The First Afonso
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Este é o primeiro Afonso, disse o Gama, Que todo Portugal aos Mouros toma; Por quem, no Estígio lago, jura a Fama De mais não celebrar nenhum de Roma. Este é aquele zeloso a quem Deus ama, Com cujo braço o Mouro imigo doma, Para quem de seu Reino abaixa os muros, Nada deixando já para os futuros,
"This is the first Afonso," said Gama, "who takes all Portugal from the Moors; on whose account Fame swears, in the Stygian lake, to celebrate no man of Rome again. This is that zealous one whom God loves, with whose arm He tames the enemy Moor, for whom He lowers the walls of his own kingdom, leaving nothing already for those who come after,"
Gama, at the king of Melinde's court, points out the painted figures of Portugal's past. He begins with Afonso Henriques, the founder-king who wrested the land from the Moors.
Gama has started naming the painted kings of Portugal, and he opens with the man the whole dynasty rests on: Afonso Henriques, who tore the country free of Moorish rule and became its first king. The lines pile the claims high. Fame herself, sworn by the underworld river Styx, promises to praise no Roman ever again now that she has this Portuguese to celebrate. God loves him; God's own arm fights through his; he takes so much that nothing is left for later kings to conquer.
The boast a first reader skims past is the last line. "Leaving nothing for those to come" sounds like pure glory, but it carries a quiet sting that runs through the whole poem: the founder was so complete that his heirs could only inherit, not equal him. Camões keeps measuring the present against a heroic past it can no longer match, and the oath sworn on the Styx, the classical machinery of Fame and the gods, is exactly how he lifts a medieval frontier war to the scale of Rome and Troy.
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