Let Them Keep Their Monsters
Read the full text in our reader
Cantem, louvem e escrevam sempre extremos Desses seus Semideuses, e encareçam, Fingindo Magas Circes, Polifemos, Sirenas que com o canto os adormeçam; Dêem-lhe mais navegar à vela e remos Os Cicones, e a terra onde se esqueçam Os companheiros, em gostando o Loto; Dêem-lhe perder nas águas o piloto;
Let them sing, praise, and forever write of the extreme feats of those demigods of theirs, and let them lay it on thick, inventing sorceress Circes, Polyphemuses, Sirens who lull them to sleep with their song; let them grant him yet more voyaging under sail and oar — the Cicones, and the land where his companions forget themselves once they taste the Lotus; let them grant him the loss of his pilot in the waters.
Near the close of Canto V, Camões turns from the story to the poets, comparing the fabulous voyages of antiquity with what the Portuguese actually endured. Here he hands the ancients back their whole inventory of marvels.
Camões is handing the ancient poets an itemized list of their own props and telling them to keep it. Circe, Polyphemus, the Sirens, the Cicones, the Lotus-eaters, the drowned pilot Palinurus — every marvel here is lifted straight out of the Odyssey and the Aeneid, and the subjunctives ("let them sing, let them give") are dismissive permissions. Go ahead, invent more. The word doing the work is encareçam: not "describe" but talk it up, inflate the price.
The move a first reader misses is that this generosity is a setup. He is not saying the old stories are bad poems; he is saying they are paid-for poems, marvels commissioned to make a patron's voyage sound large. The stanzas around this one make the contrast plain — Gama's crew faced Adamastor, scurvy, and a real ocean, and had almost no one writing it down. Camões can afford to give away the monsters because he thinks he holds the one thing the ancients had to fake: it happened.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Os Lusíadas 5.88 in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Os Lusíadas — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Os Lusíadas 5.88 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/lusiadas/5.88/