Os Lusíadas 5.39 · 5.39
Adamastor rises — the giant of the Cape
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“ Não acabava, quando uma figura Se nos mostra no ar, robusta e válida, De disforme e grandíssima estatura, O rosto carregado, a barba esquálida, Os olhos encovados, e a postura Medonha e má, e a cor terrena e pálida, Cheios de terra e crespos os cabelos, A boca negra, os dentes amarelos.
“I had not finished when a figure showed itself to us in the air, robust and strong, of misshapen and enormous stature: the face scowling, the beard filthy, the eyes sunken, and the bearing fearsome and evil, and the color earthen and pale, the hair full of earth and matted, the mouth black, the teeth yellow.
Word by word
The setting
Gama, telling the story of the voyage, reaches the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope. As he speaks, a monstrous shape forms in the air above the fleet — Adamastor, the spirit of the Cape, who will threaten every ship that dares pass. This octave is his portrait, built detail by detail out of the storm.
A note on this passage
Camões lets Gama break off his own telling — "Não acabava," I had not finished — so that the giant interrupts the narration exactly as he interrupts the voyage. Adamastor is the Cape of Storms given a face, and the face is assembled from the ground up in ugliness: deformed stature, sunken eyes, earth-clotted hair, a black mouth, yellow teeth. The verse withholds his name and his voice for now; first the reader must simply see him.
What the portrait does not yet say is that this monster is a broken lover. Adamastor will confess he was a Titan turned to stone for desiring the sea-nymph Thetis — his horror is grief hardened into rock. The ugliness Camões piles up here is the same knot the poem keeps tying, love wrecked into loss, now set at the very edge of the known world where the Portuguese must sail straight through it.
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