The Hand That Never Sweats
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Nem quem acha que é justo e que é direito Guardar-se a lei do Rei severamente, E não acha que é justo e bom respeito, Que se pague o suor da servil gente; Nem quem sempre, com pouco experto peito, Razões aprende, e cuida que é prudente, Para taxar, com mão rapace e escassa, Os trabalhos alheios, que não passa.
Nor is my song for the man who finds it just and lawful that the King's law be enforced to the letter, yet does not find it equally just and proper that the sweat of the labouring poor be paid for; nor for the man who, always with a mind that has learned little from experience, picks up arguments and supposes himself prudent, so that he may price, with a grasping and stinting hand, the toil of other men, toil he has never done himself.
Near the end of Canto 7, Camões breaks off the story of Gama in India to curse, one by one, the kinds of men his song is not for. This stanza names two of them: the magistrate who enforces the law on the poor but not the wage owed them, and the bookish official who prices other men's labour.
This is one link in a chain of curses Camões runs at the close of Canto 7: a list of the men to whom he will not sing. Here he takes two officials who are really one type. The first enforces the King's law without mercy but treats the wage owed to a labourer as a matter outside the law. The second reads his way to an opinion and calls it prudence, then uses it to set what other men's work is worth.
The hinge is "que não passa" in the last line: the labour he prices is labour he does not go through. Camões is not writing about this from a study. He had served in Ceuta and lost an eye there, sailed to India as a soldier, and was writing while the men who paid or withheld his own arrears sat safely in Lisbon. The two adjectives on the hand — rapace and escassa — are the point: grasping toward itself, tight toward everyone else.
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