Giraldo the Fearless
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Olha aquele que desce pela lança? Com as duas cabeças dos vigias, Onde a cilada esconde, com que alcança A cidade por manhas e ousadias. Ela por armas toma a semelhança Do cavaleiro, que as cabeças frias Na mão levava ( feito nunca feito!) Giraldo Sem-pavor é o forte peito.
Look at that one who comes down by the lance, carrying the two heads of the sentinels, and there hides his ambush, by which he seizes the city through cunning and daring. She (the city) takes for her coat of arms the likeness of the knight, who carried the cold heads in his hand — a deed never done before! Giraldo the Fearless is that valiant heart.
Still at Calicut, Paulo da Gama reads the painted banners to the Catual. Here the figure is Geraldo Geraldes, called Sem-Pavor ('Fearless'), who by a night ruse took Moorish Évora in 1165.
Paulo da Gama keeps pointing along the banner, and the figure now is Geraldo Geraldes, nicknamed Sem-Pavor, 'the Fearless,' who took Moorish Évora for Portugal in 1165 by killing the two tower guards on a stormy night and letting his men in. The stanza freezes the moment into an image: a knight lowering himself down a lance with two severed heads in his fist.
What a first reader misses is that the picture is literally Évora's coat of arms. Camões folds the deed and its heraldry together: the city 'takes for arms the likeness of the knight,' so the poem is describing both the historical night raid and the civic emblem the city still carried in his day. The parenthetical 'feito nunca feito' — a deed never before done — is his way of stamping the act as unrepeatable rather than merely praising it.
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