The Poet Interrupts Himself
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Um ramo na mão tinha... Mas, ó cego! Eu, que cometo insano e temerário, Sem vós, Ninfas do Tejo e do Mondego, Por caminho tão árduo, longo e vário! Vosso favor invoco, que navego Por alto mar, com vento tão contrário, Que, se não me ajudais, hei grande medo Que o meu fraco batel se alague cedo.
A branch he was holding in his hand... But, oh, blind that I am! I, who undertake something mad and reckless, without you, Nymphs of the Tejo and the Mondego, along a road so steep, so long, so winding! Your favor I invoke, for I sail across the deep sea with a wind so contrary that, if you do not help me, I greatly fear my frail little boat will soon be swamped.
In the middle of Monçaide's account of India, Camões breaks off mid-line and speaks in his own voice, calling on the nymphs of Portugal's rivers to carry him through the rest of the poem.
Camões is in the middle of describing the Indian ambassadors when the sentence stops dead. "Um ramo na mão tinha" — a branch in his hand — and then he cuts himself off and starts talking about himself. The rest of the stanza is a second invocation: he calls again on the Tágides, the nymphs of the Tejo, and adds the Mondego, the river of Coimbra where he studied. He asks for help finishing, and says he is afraid his boat will sink before he gets there.
What a first reader misses is that the broken-off line is the point. Epic convention puts the invocation at the start, once, in a firm voice; Camões has already done that in Canto 1 and is now doing it again, badly, out of order, mid-sentence. The frail batel is not a modest flourish. He is at the exact center of the poem, and the man who has to carry Gama home is admitting on the page that he may not make it.
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