The Gift Hardship Withholds
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Dá a terra lusitana Cipiões, Césares, Alexandros, e dá Augustos; Mas não lhe dá contudo aqueles dões Cuja falta os faz duros e robustos. Octávio, entre as maiores opressões, Compunha versos doutos e venustos. Não dirá Fúlvia certo que é mentira, Quando a deixava António por Glafira,
The land of Portugal produces Scipios, Caesars, Alexanders; it produces Augustuses too. But it does not give them, for all that, those other gifts whose absence leaves them hard and rough. Octavian, in the middle of the heaviest business, was writing learned and elegant verse. Fulvia will certainly not say it is a lie, since Antony was leaving her for Glaphyra,
Near the end of Canto 5 the poet steps out of Gama's voyage to complain about his own country. Portugal breeds conquerors, he says, but not the cultivation that would let them value a poem.
The stanza is a complaint dressed as a compliment. Portugal can produce commanders the equal of Rome's and Macedon's, Camões grants; what it cannot produce is men who also care about letters. The Roman names are the proof: Octavian ran an empire and still wrote verse. The "dões" Portugal withholds are not talent but cultivation, and their absence is what makes its heroes duros e robustos, hard in a way the poet does not mean kindly.
The part a first reader skips is the last couplet, which starts an anecdote that finishes in the next stanza. Antony left Fulvia, his wife, for Glaphyra, and Fulvia's response was to make war on Octavian; Octavian answered with an obscene epigram rather than a march. Camões picks the least dignified example on purpose. Even Rome's coldest politician reached for a poem in a fight over a mistress — and Camões, writing for a court that would not read him, is making a claim about his own worth by way of a joke about somebody else's.
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