The Trade You Are Born Into
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Porque os que usaram sempre um mesmo ofício, De outro não podem receber consorte, Nem os filhos terão outro exercício, Senão o de seus passados, até morte. Para os Naires é certo grande vício Destes serem tocados; de tal sorte, Que quando algum se toca, por ventura, Com cerimónias mil se alimpa e apura.
Because those who have always practiced one and the same trade cannot take a spouse from any other; nor will their sons have any occupation but that of their forebears, until death. For the Nairs it is certainly a great defilement to be touched by these people; so much so that when one of them happens to be touched, by chance, he cleanses and purifies himself with a thousand ceremonies.
Gama's messenger is being briefed on Malabar society. The Catual explains the castes: each rank keeps to its own craft, marries inside it, and passes it down. This stanza states the rule and then shows the Nairs enforcing it.
This is reportage. The Catual is telling Gama's man how Malabar works: trade is inherited, marriage stays inside the trade, and the warrior caste, the Nairs, treats contact with the lower castes as pollution that has to be washed off. Camoes gives it eight lines of plain description and no editorial verdict.
The thing a first reader misses is who is describing whom. Camoes wrote for a Portugal that had its own inherited ranks, its own purity-of-blood statutes, its own horror of the wrong touch. The word he chooses for the Nairs' revulsion is vicio, a defect, and he puts it on their side of the sentence, not on the people being avoided. A Lisbon reader in 1572 could take that as the strangeness of India, or feel it turn back on him. The stanza leaves the choice open.
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Os Lusíadas 7.38 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/lusiadas/7.38/