The Land Goes Under
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" Já a vista pouco e pouco se desterra Daqueles pátrios montes que ficavam; Ficava o caro Tejo, e a fresca serra De Sintra, e nela os olhos se alongavam. Ficava-nos também na amada terra O coração, que as mágoas lá deixavam; E já depois que toda se escondeu, Não vimos mais enfim que mar e céu.
Already, little by little, the sight banishes itself from those native hills that were staying behind; the dear Tagus stayed behind, and the cool range of Sintra, and our eyes went on reaching toward it. Our heart stayed behind too, in that beloved land, left there by our sorrows; and once the whole of it had hidden itself away, we saw nothing more, in the end, but sea and sky.
Gama is telling the king of Melinde the story of the voyage. The fleet has just left the mouth of the Tagus, and this is the moment the coast of Portugal drops below the horizon.
This is the coast going under the horizon, told slowly. Camoes measures it out in stages: first the hills, then the river, then Sintra's ridge, then everything at once, and finally the flat report of line eight, sea and sky. The verbs do the work. Four of them are imperfects that keep the land in the act of receding for four lines, and then a single preterite, escondeu, shuts it off.
The thing a first reader can miss is who is doing the leaving. Portuguese lets the sight desterrar-se, exile itself, and lets the heart ficar, stay, as if the men were the fixed point and the land the thing in motion. Nobody in the stanza sails away. Desterrar is also the ordinary legal word for banishment, so the fleet's departure is described in the vocabulary of a sentence handed down, not a departure chosen. Gama is narrating this aloud to a foreign king, years later, and the grammar is still arranging it so the exile happened to them.
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