The Twelfth Knight Arrives
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Viram todos o rosto aonde havia A causa principal do reboliço: Eis entra um cavaleiro, que trazia Armas, cavalo, ao bélico serviço. Ao Rei e às damas fala, e logo se ia Para os onze, que este era o grã Magriço; Abraça os companheiros como amigos, A quem não falta certo nos perigos.
Everyone turned to look at the source of the commotion: in rides a knight, bringing arms and horse ready for battle. He speaks to the King and to the ladies, and then went straight over to the eleven — for this was the great Magriço. He embraces his companions like friends, men who never let each other down when danger comes.
Canto 6: aboard ship in a dead calm, the sailor Veloso tells the tale of the Twelve of England. Eleven Portuguese knights have come to fight for twelve wronged English ladies; the twelfth, Magriço, travelled overland and is missing — until now.
The stanza is built out of the crowd's eyes. We do not see Magriço arrive; we see a room turn, and only then, four lines later, learn what it turned toward. Camões withholds the name until line six, so that the reader waits exactly as long as the hall does. The tense keeps shifting too — havia, trazia, era in the imperfect, but entra, fala, abraça in the present — which is how someone tells a story out loud, dropping into the present when the good part starts.
The last line is doing quiet work. Magriço is the twelfth of the Twelve of England, and the reason the eleven are eleven is that he did not come with them: he went overland, alone, and nearly missed the fight entirely. So a couplet swearing that these men never fail one another in danger arrives from the one man who almost failed. Camões is not correcting the record; he is letting the boast stand at the moment it is least earned and most needed, which is what boasts are for. The whole episode, remember, is a yarn told by sailors to pass a becalmed night.
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