The Names We Give It
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--" Dura inquietação d'alma e da vida, Fonte de desamparos e adultérios, Sagaz consumidora conhecida De fazendas, de reinos e de impérios: Chamam-te ilustre, chamam-te subida, Sendo dina de infames vitupérios; Chamam-te Fama e Glória soberana, Nomes com quem se o povo néscio engana!
Harsh disquiet of the soul and of life, fount of abandonments and adulteries, shrewd and well-known devourer of estates, of kingdoms and of empires: they call you illustrious, they call you exalted, when what you deserve is infamous reproach; they call you Fame and sovereign Glory — names by which the foolish crowd deceives itself.
The Old Man of Restelo, calling from the beach as Gama's fleet pulls away, keeps up the attack he began in the previous stanza against the hunger for glory and command. Here he stops describing it and starts naming it.
The stanza is an indictment read aloud. Four lines list what the hunger for glory does: it will not let the soul or the life sit still, it empties houses of the men who leave them, and it eats through property, kingdoms and empires alike. Then the last four lines turn to what people call it instead — illustrious, exalted, Fame, sovereign Glory. The old man's charge is not that ambition is evil in some abstract way; it is that the accounting is fraudulent, and the fraud is done with words.
What a first reader can miss is where the fight actually is. "Chamam-te" three times: the argument is over a name, not a thing. And notice what sits on the list of things this appetite consumes — impérios. Camões has the old man name the Portuguese empire itself among the wreckage, in the middle of the poem written to praise it, and gives him no reply. The ships leave the beach anyway, and the poem goes with them.
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