Hugh Primas and Friend

by

Gillian Polack

Latin poetry can be a wonderful thing. It can also be desperately pretentious. Today I want to talk about the wonderful, witty side of it. I don’t feel pretentious enough for depth and high poesie, perhaps. Or maybe it’s because I have a lovely new review volume of Medieval Latin poetry, and I’m very excited about it and so you get to share. The volume in question is from the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library and contains edited and translated (so Latin is not essential) versions of both the Arundel Lyrics and Hugh Primas’ poems.

There is a good introduction. It’s more for those who love the technical side of poetry than for those who read it for the art or the humour or the information on social history, but it contains some very solid stuff. I’m not going into it here, however, simply because I don’t believe that the way to lure innocents into reading medieval poetry is through talking at great length about modern (technical) introductions. My suspicion is that anyone who enjoys such introductions is already reading the poetry.

As the editor points out, there is much good stuff in these poems. What struck me when he said it and again at looking at the poems themselves is that the town and the people of the town are equally characters in these poems.

Small poems can bring large characters to life with a mere few words. Poem 26 of the Arundel Lyrics does this, with a nice little warning attached. In fact, I think that verse eleven needs to be extracted from the rest and considered as a message about being wary of the wrong type of interest:

Cum talentum tandem videt,
Non iam fremit neque stridet,
Set blanditur et subridet;

“When at least he sees a talent, he no longer roars or shrieks, but speaks ingratiatingly and smiles;” (translation by Christopher J McDonough, who also edited this book; the translations follow the poems closely, which is a lovely thing because it means non-Latinists can follow).

One of the best things about this volume, from my perspective, is that it’s lyric poetry. Lyrics are one of my favourite forms. Small and flexible and wide-ranging in subject, they’re easy to understand but can contain an extraordinary amount of content. They can evoke moments or illustrate morals. They can remind us of people we know or of people we really don’t want to know. Much of my favourite lyric poetry is in Middle English or Old French: this Latin poetry turns out to be just as welcome, just as evocative, and just as entertaining.

Hugh Primas is even more worth a look (on all these accounts) than the Arundel poems. Hugh Primas was as famous for his wit in his day as Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker are in ours. The second of his poems in this collection (which begins with the gorgeously evocative words “Pontificum spuma”—“scum of bishops”—and here I must say that I have met two bishops and neither of them are anything like this description) curses the benefactor who gives him a cloak in midwinter and that cloak has been stripped of its down. Poor Hugh was bereft of decent winter clothes, it seems, for the twelfth poem also scolds for a cloak’s uselessness. The last two lines say it all:

Nec pulices operit, latebrasque pulex ubi querit.
Quas quia non reperit, ipsa reperta perit.

“It does not even conceal the fleas from sight; and when a flea tries to find hiding places, it is itself discovered and dies, because it fails to find them.” Translated by O’Donough.

In poem 13B, Hugh takes the cloak’s perspective and mourns for having been given to someone rather unworthy.

There are other poems about cloaks. Hugh Primas was all his reputation says, and some are biting and some are funny and some are merely comments.

It’s not a big book, but O’Donough's edition contains much joy and repays dipping into and pulling out plums and reading them aloud and being entertained.

Now that I’ve discussed the volume, a couple of warnings are in order.

Firstly, while I’m in a sharing and caring mood, I’m not so sharing and caring that I’m going to quote at great length from the erotic sections of verse. This is because I have a wide readership and I want my younger readers to encounter this type of work by choice, not because I thrust it in their faces. The erotic texts in this volume are worth the look. Let me say this tantalisingly. Like the other poems, they focus on the human.

Secondly, it’s important to be quite careful in reading this poetry aloud in the original. Reading the translations aloud is not a problem. It’s the original that can trip one up. I was reading quietly to myself, for instance, and didn’t pay quite enough attention to the metre and put in the sort of one-two one-two one-two rhythm you can find in English verse (this rhythm why iambic pentameters work so magically in English—the iambic element comes very naturally to English-language speech) and the poem I was reading turned suddenly rather Monty Pythonesque. Do the same thing to Virgil’s Aeneid and you'll find—as someone taught me far too many years ago—that you can sing it to the tune of “Be kind to your four footed fiends.” Worse, do it to Psalm 126 in Hebrew (which I always think of as the ‘Grace after Meals’ Psalm when it’s actually one of the Pilgrim Psalms, but that’s another story), and you can sing it to the tune of “Waltzing Matilda.” Good party tricks, but not kind to the actual poem being read.

An even better party trick, and one that actually adds to the poems in question, can be developed simply through reading the introduction to this volume, where the syllables and rhythm are thoroughly discussed. For Hugh Primas, dactylic meter is also explained. And now I’m contradicting myself because I’m suggesting that you really may want to read the introduction. Just don’t be misled by the scholarly nature of that introduction into thinking that the poems are dull. They aren’t.

I’m still smiling at the thought of some of them, and want to email a bunch of friends to let them know I’ve found proof of padded (with feathers or down) lined cloaks in the Middle Ages. My new ideal Medieval cloak has goose down padding and a purple lining and it’s all the fault of Hugh Primas and his witty obsession with cloaks. Poetry is full of gifts and dreams, not all of them the ones I expect.

Book mentioned in this column:
The Arundel Lyrics. The Poems of High Primas, ed. and tr. By Christopher J McDonough (Harvard University Press, 2010)

Gillian Polack is based in Canberra, Australia. She is mainly a writer, editor and educator. Her most recent print publications are a novel (Life through Cellophane, Eneit Press, 2009), an anthology (Masques, CSfG Publishing, 2009, co-edited with Scott Hopkins), two short stories and a slew of articles. Her newest anthology is Baggage, published by Eneit Press (2010).One of her short stories won a Victorian Ministry of the Arts award a long time ago, and three have (more recently) been listed as recommended reading in international lists of world's best fantasy and science fiction short stories. She received a Macquarie Bank Fellowship and a Blue Mountains Fellowship to work on novels at Varuna, an Australian writers' residence in the Blue Mountains. Gillian has a doctorate in Medieval history from the University of Sydney. She researches food history and also the Middle Ages, pulls the writing of others to pieces, is fascinated by almost everything, cooks and etc. Currently she explains 'etc' as including Arthuriana, emotional cruelty to ants, and learning how not to be ill. She is the proud owner of some very pretty fans, a disarticulated skull named Perceval, and 6,000 books. Contact Gillian.