The Enterprise of Love
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--" Amores da alta esposa de Peleu Me fizeram tomar tamanha empresa. Todas as Deusas desprezei do céu, Só por amar das águas a princesa. Um dia a vi coas filhas de Nereu Sair nua na praia, e logo presa A vontade senti de tal maneira Que ainda não sinto coisa que mais queira.
"Love for the lofty wife of Peleus made me take on so great an enterprise. I scorned all the goddesses of heaven, only to love the princess of the waters. One day I saw her come out naked on the shore with the daughters of Nereus, and at once I felt my will so caught that even now I feel nothing I want more."
Adamastor, the giant of the Cape, is telling Gama's crew who he was. Here he names the cause of his ruin: he loved Thetis, the sea-nymph married to Peleus, and gave up every other goddess for her.
Adamastor gives the cause of everything that follows. He loved Thetis, a sea-nymph married to the mortal Peleus, and he says he turned down every goddess in heaven for her. Then he dates the moment: one day, one sighting, on a beach, and it was done. The last line puts the wound in the present tense - not "I wanted" but "I feel", still, now, as a rock at the Cape.
The word to watch is empresa, enterprise. It is the word the poem uses for the voyage itself, the thing Gama and his men are in the middle of. Adamastor is telling a crew of men on a great undertaking that he too had one, and that it was a woman on a shore, and that it turned him into the thing now blocking their way. Camões is also quietly merging two figures - Thetis, mother of Achilles, and Tethys, the old goddess of the sea - which is why a nymph of the Iliad can be called the princess of the waters.
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