Neptune's Wife
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Vinha por outra parte a linda esposa De Netuno, de Celo e Vesta filha, Grave e leda no gesto, e tão formosa Que se amansava o mar de maravilha. Vestida uma camisa preciosa Trazia de delgada beatilha, Que o corpo cristalino deixa ver-se, Que tanto bem não é para esconder-se.
From another quarter came Neptune's lovely wife, daughter of Coelus and Vesta, dignified and glad in her face, and so beautiful that the sea grew calm in wonder at her. She wore a precious shift of thin gauze that lets her crystalline body be seen — for so much beauty is not a thing to be hidden.
The sea-gods gather for Bacchus' council beneath the waves. Amphitrite, wife of Neptune, arrives among them — Camões pauses the plot to look at her.
The stanza is a formal entrance. Amphitrite arrives at the council of the sea-gods, and Camões stops the narrative to describe her the way a court poet describes a queen: parentage first, then bearing, then dress. The one physical event in the eight lines is the sea going flat as she passes — beauty registered not as a claim but as a change in the water.
What a first reader misses is that the last line is the poet talking, not the goddess. "Que tanto bem não é para esconder-se" is an aside justifying the transparent gauze, and it quietly justifies the poem's own looking. Camões keeps doing this in Canto 6 — the divine machinery is inherited from Virgil and Homer, but the appetite in the description is his, and he knows it enough to excuse it in a line.
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Os Lusíadas 6.21 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/lusiadas/6.21/