Teachers who use Ecce Romani will know about the Scottish poet of Latin, Buchanan. (I can't give you chapter and verse, but when I used the course I met Buchanan for the first time.) These teachers, and others, will probably be interested in this book, reviewed in The Scotsman.
Awakening Scotland's Latin spirit
SIMON PULLEYNApollos of the North
George Buchanan, Arthur Johnston – Robert Crawford (ed./tr.)
Polygon, £14.99
ONE might not expect a pair of Scottish poets writing in the wake of the Reformation to choose Latin as the medium for their expression. But, in those days, Latin was still a living language. Nowadays, of course, things are different, but Robert Crawford has rolled up his sleeves and provided a spirited facing translation to assist the uninitiated with these selected poems of George Buchanan and Arthur Johnston.
Buchanan was born in 1506 in Stirlingshire, fought in the French army at the age of 17, studied at St Andrews and Paris, was imprisoned by the Inquisition in Portugal, escaped with his life and ended up back in Scotland as tutor to James VI. He died in Edinburgh in 1582. Johnston was born in 1579 near Inverurie in Aberdeenshire, studied in Aberdeen and Heidelberg, became Professor of Physic at Sedan, but eventually returned to Scotland. He became Rector of Aberdeen University in 1637 and died in 1641.
Unsurprisingly, the man who suffered at the hands of the Inquisition writes very differently from the man who began and ended his life in rural Aberdeenshire. When reading Buchanan, one sometimes has the impression of reading the invectives of Catullus or Horace. His 'Franciscanus' contains an excoriating piece about Fr William Lang conducting a fantastical exorcism on a barren heath. Crawford's renderings are lively, if not always particularly close to the original. Thus Lang is a “Franciscan spindoctor to James the Fifth… hocuspocussing like mad”; Diogio de Murça, Rector of Coimbra, is “Master Beleago MBA (Monster of Bestial Accumulation”, who has “wholly Mastered Being Ahead”, a “no-brain, blackballed Baal of the Unbelles Lettres /Of Marketing, our Mall-mad Manager”.
This is not what Buchanan wrote, but it might strike a chord with anyone who has worked in a modern university. The wedding hymn for Francis of Valois and Mary Queen of Scots is a long and turgid piece of toadying in which Mary is advised to acknowledge her womanly place and learn to bear the yoke of marriage. The extracts from 'De Sphaera' show Buchanan attempting a grand scientific poem in the manner of Lucretius.
Buchanan writes in a variety of styles. He was clearly profoundly learned in the finer points of metre, prosody, and rhetoric. But his verses struck me as ultimately rather frigid. I often felt that he was showing off his manipulation of metre and vocabulary like a precocious undergraduate, with results that could be jarring and did little for the underlying thought.
Johnston, on the other hand, writes in a mellow and fluid manner that reminded me strongly of Ovid. Some might tire of the succession of short pieces in praise of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Stirling, St Andrews, Dundee, Montrose, Brechin, Aberdeen and Elgin. But they are beautifully deft vignettes, full of evocative and charming imagery – far more satisfying, for example, than Buchanan's rather ponderous piece in praise of Paris.
Johnston's poem about the atrocity at Frendrocht on October 8, 1630, where John Gordon, Viscount of Melgum and John Gordon of Rothiemay were burned alive in a tower, shows Johnston combining his talent for arresting visual descriptions with an eloquent rhetoric of moral indignation. Although the fashion has been to exalt Buchanan over Johnston, one feels that Buchanan could never have written like this.
Filed under: Book reviews, Main Page
Reviews that did not overturn received opinion would have nothing to say for themselves, but it’s odd that Buchanan also wrote lines (to settle a score with the man who denounced him to the Inquisition, mentioned in this review) which have some sort of relationship with the postmodernist approach derided by Peter Jones at the Summer School last week:
Quae tibi pro fictis vis credi, ficta negato
Et quae vera cupis credi, ea vera nega.
“[T]his kind of charge and counter-charge became almost inevitable”, the Lothian Print edition notes (George Buchanan: The Political Poetry, ed. McGinnis and Williamson, 1995, p.45), in a “poisoned world”. Perhaps the reviewer is right, and injustice coarsened Buchanan. Or perhaps his tragedy was to be stuck on this idea that you could tell the truth for what it was, which may make sense only in a monastery – and there weren’t a lot of options left that way by the time of Buchanan’s Scotland.
Doesn’t it lack integrity to criticise Buchanan simply for not being Johnston? If what you like is a pastoral scene, that is the sort of thing you like, and if Ovid laughs at Horace, so what? It’s a bit over-refined to think that the proof of sincerity is always and everywhere the appearance of calculated insincerity. And particularly strange about this review is the stuff about Mary. All courtiers who want to avoid being ostracised have to suck up to the Queen. Does anyone really think that even Buchanan means it when (in one of the toadying ones) he is forced to write
Unde repentino fremuerunt viscera motu?
Cur Phoebum desueta pati praecordia anhelus
Fervor agit…?
&c, & c, &c. (McG & W, p.127) All such expressions are very conventional!
The case not so much of a frigid poet, as a mixed-up review.
Much as I admire Buchanan — and of course his complaint of the horrors of teaching isn't in the book, nor is Johnston's poem of the fisherman protesting at not being allowed to work on a Sunday, both translated into Scots by Robert Garioch and in English prose in a Treasury of Scottish Poetry, I could even prefer the turgidity of the Mary Queen of Scots wedding poem, and of course one or two of the Elegies available in English only in an obscure academic publication Roberrt Crawford hardly bothered himself with, to the following — which has no place in a Selected poems printed in Latin with facing English. This is the end of BELEAGO, concocted from Buchanan's poems against a betrayer, and referec to by Crawford as his own poem — to which he is welcome.
Cretinous silly-git syllogist, philosobutcher, Zeno of Lard,
Exhibitionist, inquisitionist, circumcisionist,
Throatslitter, nestshitter, brainquitter, inkspitter, Grand
Inquisitor’s Portuguese Libyajewish Supergrass who grassed
Me up, got me arrested, tested, tortured, chucked
In prison, that Magog of goats and groats,
That Papal brown-noser, that Sniffer-out-of-Heretics-in-his-own-Sandals,
That academic Vandal, I want to hear him caught and locked and trapped
In his own echoing ‘Sell! sell! sell! sell! sell! sell!’
Forever, so I can sing
Your praises, Lord Rector, and pray
With a loud shout, a whoop, a from-the-heart ‘Wey-hey-hey!’ –
Baal-Iago, Beleago, BYE BYE!
I seem to have been rather exercised at the time of writing, and I was being rather casuitical in defending Buchanan, but in the service of what might be a larger point, that it seems superficial to discredit one man because another is more to one’s taste. That's how the review struck me at the time. People say damning things in the public press (or blogs) that wouldn’t be allowed in sixth form essays. Actual judgments of taste have to involve some consideration of intentions, and McGinnis and Williamson make a fairly good case, through some sensitive reading, for showing that Buchanan had a single and serious overriding purpose in what he wrote, despite his defects of character and tergiversations in life. Switching sides from one possible patron to another, their reading is that Buchanan was trying to find a monarch (in a world which offered only monarchy) so virtuous that he might establish a polity which, formally monarchical, was civilised, Roman, Republican. Johnstone (on the other hand) was the Laudian, English candidate for Buchanan’s laurels in a later, more self-serving age, flogging the lyrical local colour praised by The Scotsman’s reviewer because nostalgic catenae of this kind had done well (brought in the lucre) on the Continent. Whereas there was some principle to Buchanan – I think for him Classics was more than a motif. I still think it may have been a mistake for him to hope that principles are most appropriately set out in verse – perhaps poetry-lovers sound as if they are talking about values and ideas, but really, in fact, just like the sound. Plato would say, best say no more.
My enduring problem with Robert Crawford, who wrote a goodish collection once, very well called ‘A Scottish Assembly’ (in the John Smith days), before going off to teach writing by numbers in the pinnacle of Fife, is the obverse of what Poetry Review once praised as his attention to the Zeitgeist. This review’s understanding of Buchanan’s context and that of his poems seems so shallow – it may not truly represent Crawford’s – it makes me feel like an (old) historicist. The Mary Queen of Scots poem has no real concern at all with Mary’s even being a woman, or “wifely duty”, or whatever: it is addressing her status as an independent sovereign, echoing contemporary French fears that her marriage to the French king would or might dilute or undermine the French interest, and using the “obey-your-husbands” idea of marriage as a conceit to urge consistency in policy on the united monarchs. Its concern is the stability of civil institutions and nation states, not anyone’s gender. But here we go in this original review, taking words from the 16th century out of their lived place and reading through the lens of contemporary political rectitude. It’s irritating, a crass simplification built up from what are appear to be not much more than puns in the reviewed book. (This is probably very unfair, but often Crawford’s alliteration itself strikes me as a captious.)
As to the coarseness, “Maister of Arts, but wantin craft” – what Garioch says of himself applies to Buchanan in at least one sense of “craft”. Garioch’s Buchanan is good. “The Muse, wha doesna share her rule / wi sordid maisters, leaves the fule, / sans merci, til his fate”: merciless, these gods the philosophers couldn’t finally believe in; “I cannae credit / The thocht that Hevin’s court is swee’d by mere ill-will”, as Garioch’s Johnstone says, is certainly the only response to be left to your fate. All very well put. At least invective in those days was a genre, and did not permeate all discourse! Literature did what gentlemen seek to do (as someone once told me): and was only rude when it meant to be.
One thing. The fact that Alexander McCall Smith cites Garioch in the latest Isabel Dalhousie made me wonder with some foreboding if Garioch hadn’t been forgotten to the extent that it was becoming smart to mention him (! & ?), but I’ve always liked:
I wes at a gaitherin
of hypocrites of aa sizes,
including masel,
tho, being a wee yin,
I had to jink in at the back door,
and thair I saw aa the Gret Hypocrites,
(me out of sicht, no supposed to be thair)
and amang aa thae braw hypocrites,
the bravest of them aa
wes thon gret Scotch scotcher of hypocrites.
Ken wha I mean?
It’s a national illness, that scenario. I wish we could leave that to its fate today instead.