The Small House
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Mas entanto que cegos e sedentos Andais de vosso sangue, ó gente insana! Não faltarão Cristãos atrevimentos, Nesta pequena casa Lusitana: De África tem marítimos assentos, É na Ásia mais que todas soberana, Na quarta parte nova os campos ara, E se mais mundo houvera, lá chegara.
But while you go about blind and thirsting after your own blood, you mad people, Christian daring will not be lacking in this small Lusitanian house. She holds the sea-coast strongholds of Africa; in Asia she is more sovereign than any of you; in the new fourth part of the world she is plowing the fields. And if there were more world than there is, she would have got there too.
Camões has been scolding the Christian powers of Europe for turning their weapons on each other instead of on the common enemy. Here he breaks off the rebuke to point at one exception: Portugal.
Camões has spent the preceding stanzas listing the Christian powers of Europe one by one and telling each what it should be doing instead of fighting its neighbors. This stanza is the turn: he stops accusing and points to the one country that, in his account, is doing the work. The four claims are a map — Africa, Asia, the new fourth part, and then a place that does not exist.
The boast is quieter than it looks, and the word doing the work is "casa." Not empire, not nation: house, as in household, the House of Aviz — small, and Camões says so before he says anything else. A first reader hears bragging; what the grammar carries is a defense. Portugal cannot answer Castile or France by size, so it answers by reach. Note also the last line's tense: "houvera... chegara" are past forms doing conditional work, so the arrival at a world that was never made is reported as if it had already happened.
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Os Lusíadas 7.14 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/lusiadas/7.14/