George Buchanan, ‘Rusticus’s “Hem”’ (1547)
George Buchanan was one of the most celebrated poets in sixteenth-century Europe. He was a Scottish scholar and humanist who spent time at the University of Paris and in Portugal (he was arrested by the Portuguese Inquisition and interrogated for a whole year), returning to Scotland towards the end of his life, where he converted to Protestantism and became royal tutor to the young James VI. He published a variety of things, including the prose dialogue De Jure Regni apud Scotos (1579) that argued that a monarch’s power is limited by the people over whom he rules and from whom his power ultimately derives, and that it was licit to resist a tyrant (‘the importance of the work is proved by the persistent efforts of the legislature to suppress it during the century following its publication. It was condemned by Act of Parliament in 1584, and again in 1664; and in 1683 it was burned by the University of Oxford’). Buchanan also published a great deal of celebrated poetry: two verse tragedies, collections of elegies, hendecesyllabics and sylvae, epigrams, verse translations of the Psalms, all very highly regarded by his contemporaries. Because he wrote in Latin his work has been entirely forgotten, and is known today only to specialists. In this old blog I translated one of his idylls, ‘Desiderium Lutetiae’ (written 1552; published in Sylvae, 1567) into English. It’s very good. The poem I mean, not my translation.
Neo-Latin literature, that huge body of writing, the main literary discursive mode of medieval and Renaissance Europe, may strike us as a rather forbidding prospect. There is a lot of it, and quite a lot is pretty offputting. There are a great many encomia, many of them lengthy, praising kings and princes, nobles and Popes and notable folk — Buchanan wrote quite a few of these — and they are very dull. Much neo-Latin poetry is devotional, not liable to strike us as an improvement dullness-wise. But a lot of neo-Latin poetry is playful, witty, sometimes bawdy. If we think of Buchanan as a grim-faced cleric, ponderously recasting the psalms of David into Latin lyric meters, we may be surprised to come across a short poem like this one. But actually most neo-Latin poets wrote stuff like this.
A peasant chopping wood with an axe grunts ‘hem’ every time he swings.
Rusticus hem cunctos cum congeminaret ad ictus,
hyberno properans findere ligna foco;
syllaba quid toties juvet hem geminate laborem
quærenti uxori, rettulit ille, ‘juvat:
nempe simul toto contentis corpore nervis
in rimam cuneum forticus ictus agit.’
Illa memor, Venerus media inter gaudia, telum
ut penetrat magia, hem congeminare jubet
‘nil opus est’ inquit ‘nunc hoc conamine, coniunx:
findere te sane nolo, forare volo.’
This means:
A peasant grunted hem together with each blow
as he chopped a log for the winter hearth;
as to why he repeated the syllable hem as he swung
he told his wife (who’d asked): ‘it helps the work:
for, as my muscles are strained throughout my body,
each blow drives my axe into the crack more forcefully.’
She recalls this in the middle of their lovemaking,
tells him to hem so the ‘cleaver’ goes in harder.
‘There’s no need,’ he replies, ‘for such effort, my wife.
I’m not trying to split you, just drill you.’
Forare (in the last line) means: ‘to pierce, to puncture, to punch a hole in’; I’ve gone with ‘drill’. In line 7 telum means: weapon (particularly it means: arrow, dart, spear, javelin, shaft) — but of course there’s a double-entendre: Martial [11.78.6] is only one of several poets use the word for the male member.
The poem is an example of Latin elegaic metre: alternating lines of dactyllic hexameter and dactyllic pentameter. Here’s another go, reproducing the long-short dactyllic pulse of the original.
Rusticus grunted out hem with each swinging blow
chopping a log for his wintertime hearth;
why he repeated the syllable hem like this
asked by his wife — he said: ‘helps with the task:
for, as my muscles are strained through my whole body,
each one drives axe into crack with more heart.’
She recalls this in the middle of lovemaking,
tells him to hem so the ‘axe’ goes in hard.
‘There is no need,’ he replies, ‘for such effort, wife.
Just want to drill you, not split you apart.’
Buchanan scholar I.D. McFarlane tells the story of this little poem in a footnote to his article ‘George Buchanan’s Franciscanus: the History of a Poem’ [Journal of European Studies 4:2 (1974), 126–39].
The French peasant, in the original, grunts han. I think hem is better.
