The Machine of the World
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Agora sobre as nuvens os subiam As ondas de Netuno furibundo; Agora a ver parece que desciam As íntimas entranhas do Profundo. Noto, Austro, Bóreas, Aquilo queriam Arruinar a máquina do mundo: A noite negra e feia se alumia Com os raios, em que o Pólo todo ardia.
Now the waves of raging Neptune were lifting them above the clouds; now it looked as though they were going down to see the innermost bowels of the Deep. Noto, Austro, Bóreas and Aquilo were bent on ruining the machine of the world: the black, ugly night lights itself up with the lightning-bolts, in which the whole sky was burning.
The storm off the coast of India, raised by Bacchus through the winds. The fleet is thrown between the sky and the sea-floor while the four winds attack at once.
The stanza works by pure alternation: up, then down, then up again. Two "Agora"s at the head of lines 1 and 3 set the rhythm, and the imperfect tense (subiam, desciam, queriam) keeps the motion unfinished — this is not one wave but a state the ship is stuck in. Then the four winds are named in a row, and the last two lines flip the light: the black night lights itself, but only with the lightning that is burning the sky.
The phrase to sit with is "a máquina do mundo" — the machine of the world. It is not a metaphor Camões invented for a storm; it is the standard Renaissance term for the whole created cosmos, spheres and elements fitted together. So line 6 is not saying the winds might sink a ship. It says they would like to take the universe apart. That is why the four winds appear at once, which never happens in nature — Camões is quoting the shipwreck in Aeneid I, where Aeolus lets them all out together, and a first reader who takes the line as weather misses that the whole frame of things is what's at stake.
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