Tityrus in Africa
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" As mulheres queimadas vêm em cima Dos vagarosos bois, ali sentadas, Animais que eles têm em mais estima Que todo o outro gado das manadas. Cantigas pastoris, ou prosa ou rima, Na sua língua cantam concertadas Com o doce som das rústicas avenas, Imitando de Títiro as Camenas.
The sunburnt women ride in on the backs of slow oxen, seated up there — animals these people hold in higher regard than all the rest of the cattle in their herds. Pastoral songs, whether prose or rhyme, they sing in their own language, in tune with one another, to the sweet sound of rustic reed pipes, imitating the Camenae of Tityrus.
Gama is describing the herding people his fleet met on the East African coast. Having praised the men in the stanza before, he turns to the women, the cattle, and the music.
Gama has stopped counting hostile shores for a moment and is simply reporting what he saw: women carried on oxback, a herd ranked by affection rather than price, singing that goes on in a language nobody aboard can follow. It is one of the few stretches of the poem where Africans are described doing something other than receiving or resisting Portuguese ships.
The last line is where the report quietly stops being a report. Tityrus is the herdsman who opens Virgil's first Eclogue, and the Camenae are the Roman spring-goddesses Latin poets used for the Muses. Camões does not say the singing sounds pastoral — he says it imitates a Latin poem, which is backwards: the herders have never heard of Virgil. The comparison is the only instrument Gama has, and it makes the scene legible to the King of Melinde and to Lisbon at the cost of the thing actually heard.
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