The Nereids Make Ready
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Já todo o belo coro se aparelha Das Nereidas, e junto caminhava Em coreias gentis, usança velha, Para a ilha, a que Vénus as guiava. Ali a formosa Deusa lhe aconselha O que ela fez mil vezes, quando amava. Elas, que vão do doce amor vencidas, Estão a seu conselho oferecidas.
Already the whole fair troop of the Nereids makes ready, and moves along together in graceful choral dances, an old custom, toward the island to which Venus was guiding them. There the lovely Goddess advises them in what she herself did a thousand times, when she was in love. They, going conquered by sweet love, stand wholly given over to her counsel.
On Venus's Isle of Love, the sea-nymphs prepare to receive Gama's sailors. Venus coaches them in the arts of love before the encounter.
The stanza is stage-managing a seduction. Venus has already arranged for her sea-nymphs to meet the Portuguese sailors on the Isle of Love, and here they rehearse: dancing their way to the island while the goddess herself gives instructions drawn from her own long experience of desire. The reward Camões grants his heroes is frankly erotic, and he does not apologize for it.
What a first reader can miss is that the nymphs are not simply obedient props. Camões says they go "do doce amor vencidas" — already conquered by sweet love before they reach the men. The encounter he is setting up is not conquest of the nymphs but mutual surrender, and the poet quietly insists the desire runs both ways, which is why the whole episode reads as reward rather than exploitation.
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