Honors Won by the Arm
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Mas com buscar com o seu forçoso braço As honras, que ele chame próprias suas; Vigiando, e vestindo o forjado aço, Sofrendo tempestades e ondas cruas; Vencendo os torpes frios no regaço Do Sul e regiões de abrigo nuas; Engolindo o corrupto mantimento, Temperado com um árduo sofrimento;
But rather by seeking, with his own forceful arm, the honors that he may call properly his own; standing watch, and wearing the forged steel; enduring storms and raw waves; conquering the vile cold in the lap of the South and in regions bare of any shelter; swallowing the spoiled rations, seasoned with a hard suffering;
Near the close of Canto 6, after the storm has been stilled and the fleet nears India, Camões speaks in his own voice about how fame is actually earned. This stanza is one long list of what the honor-seeker must swallow.
This is one item in a long sentence that has not finished yet. Camões is contrasting two ways of getting fame: the soft way, which he has just dismissed, and this one, which is nothing but a list of discomforts. Notice that not one of the gerunds names a battle. Standing watch, wearing armor, being cold, eating rotten food. The honors are mentioned once, in line two, and then the stanza spends six lines on what they cost.
The detail a first reader skims past is "temperado" in the last line. It is a cooking word, and it lands on the rotten provisions of the line before: the food is seasoned with suffering. Camões sailed to India himself and ate that food. The joke is bitter and precise, and it is the closest the stanza comes to admitting that the man who earns honor this way does not enjoy it while he is earning it.
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