The City Called Calicut
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Da terra os naturais lhe chamam Gate, Do pé do qual pequena quantidade Se estende uma fralda estreita, que combate Do mar a natural ferocidade. Aqui de outras cidades, sem debate, Calecu tem a ilustre dignidade De cabeça de Império rica e bela: Samorim se intitula o senhor dela.
The natives of the land call it Gate; from the foot of it a narrow strip of small extent stretches out, which fights against the natural ferocity of the sea. Here, without dispute among the other cities, Calicut holds the illustrious dignity of head of a rich and beautiful Empire: its lord takes the title of Samorim.
Monçaide, the Muslim from Tunis who speaks Gama's language, is describing India to the Portuguese. Having named the mountain range that runs down the subcontinent, he now points to the coastal strip below it and to the city that rules there.
This is a geography lesson delivered inside a poem. Monçaide is naming the Western Ghats, the mountain wall that runs behind India's southwest coast, and then the thin coastal shelf below it — the Malabar strip, which is where all the pepper is, and where Gama has just anchored. The stanza ends by handing the Portuguese the one fact they need: the man in charge of Calicut is called the Samorim.
The word doing the quiet work is combate. The land does not merely lie beside the sea; the narrow strip fights it. Camões has spent six cantos describing men who cross the ocean, and here even the ground is at war with the water. It also flatters the coast the Portuguese have come to take: a place already defined by struggle, already possessing an Empire, a head, a lord with his own title. Nothing here is empty for the taking, and Camões knows it — the arrival at Calicut is the poem's climax and the beginning of its complications.
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