Poem

Luís Vaz de Camões

Side by side

Few and wearisome years I lived . . .

Few and wearisome years I lived
in the world, enduring vile hardship;
the light of day went dark on me
before I saw my twenty-sixth year.

I traveled distant lands and seas,
trying to find a cure for life,
but perilous ventures can’t attain
what Fortune, finally, doesn’t will.

Portugal brought me up in dear
green Alenquer, my home, but rotten
air in my earthen vessel changed me

into food for your fish, O vicious
sea that rages by Abyssinia,
so bleak and far from my happy homeland!

*Pero Moniz was presumably a fellow soldier of Camões, whose own experience when stationed in the Gulf of Aden, near Mount Felix, is recorded in one of his Songs. The “rotten air” of the first tercet refers, perhaps, to a disease that took the speaker’s life. Alenquer, a small town north of Lisbon, is mentioned elsewhere in Camões’s poetry, leading biographers to wonder if he might have been born or partly raised there.

Few and wearisome years I lived . . .

No mundo poucos anos, e cansados,
vivi, cheios de vil miséria dura;
foi-me tão cedo a luz do dia escura,
que não vi cinco lustros acabados.

Corri terras e mares apartados,
buscando à vida algum remédio ou cura;
mas aquilo que, enfim, não quer ventura,
não o alcançam trabalhos arriscados.

Criou-me Portugal na verde e cara
pátria minha Alenquer; mas ar corruto
que neste meu terreno vaso tinha,

me fez manjar de peixes em ti, bruto
mar, que bates na Abássia fera e avara,
tão longe da ditosa pátria minha!