The Island's Untroubled Actaeon
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Ao longo da água o níveo cisne canta, Responde-lhe do ramo filomela; Da sombra de seus cornos não se espanta Acteon, n'água cristalina e bela; Aqui a fugace lebre se levanta Da espessa mata, ou tímida gazela; Ali no bico traz ao caro ninho O mantimento o leve passarinho.
Along the water the snowy swan sings, and the nightingale answers it from the branch. Actaeon is not frightened by the shadow of his own antlers in the clear and lovely water. Here the fleeting hare starts up from the thick woods, or the timid gazelle; and there in its beak the light little bird carries food home to its dear nest.
From the Ilha dos Amores in Canto 9, the enchanted island Venus prepares as a reward for Gama's crew. This stanza paints the paradise's wildlife: swan, nightingale, hare, gazelle, and a nesting bird.
The stanza is a quiet catalogue of the enchanted island's wildlife: swan and nightingale answering each other over the water, a hare and a gazelle in the brush, a small bird ferrying food to its nest. It builds the locus amoenus, the perfect pleasure-place, that Venus has readied as the crew's reward, and its calm is the whole point after the sea-terrors of the earlier cantos.
The detail a first reader slides past is Actaeon. In Ovid he is the hunter who stumbles on Diana bathing, is turned into a stag, and is torn apart by his own hounds. Camões names an Actaeon who now stands unafraid before the shadow of his own antlers. That single reversal marks this island as the anti-Diana place: here looking, and the desire behind it, no longer bring punishment.
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Os Lusíadas 9.63 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/lusiadas/9.63/