Plusieurs apres avoir d’un bras victorieux 

Domté le dur effort des superbes courages 

Se bastirent jadis magnifiques ouvrages 

Pour estre garantis du temps iniurieux: 

Autres craignans leurs faits et actes glorieux 

Assujettir au feu tempestes orages, 

Firent divins escrits qui malgré tels outrages, 

Ont fait voler leurs noms jusque’au plus haut des cieux. 

Maints encor aujourd’huy, par oeuvre meritoire 

Se font monter aussi au Temple de memoire 

Ne desirans rien plus que d’eux eterniser 

Mais tu t’acquiers honneur, loz, et gloire immortelle 

Par les divins beaux traits de ta plume fidelle 

Laquelle tu scais mieux que femme manier. 

ANP: So how were you able to ascertain that the Discours de la Foy and the translation of the Octonaires into English were actually Esther Inglis’ own work, or were most likely to be?   

JRB: If we take the Discours first, the strongest reason is that absolutely no printed text of this impressive poem can be found. And at that time, polemical poetry, which is what the Discours is, was very readily printed and circulated. The poem dates from 1590; it appears to be a poem written with considerable urgency in response to the dire military situation of the Huguenot forces in France. By late 1590 there were four separate Spanish-backed armies on French soil, working for the ligue catholique to try to annihilate the French Protestant armies under Henri de Navarre. That is the main reason for taking this poem to be Esther’s original: we can’t find a printed copy of it. I did find a printed model, a versified version of the Apostles’ Creed. There are quite a number of verbal parallels; the stanza forms are not the same. So it’s circumstantial evidence, but it is very strong. The mastery of the verse is typical of her other writings in French; this is the work of somebody who is very familiar with French spiritual poetry, French religious poetry, French devotional poetry, and the work of somebody who knew exactly what they were doing, what they wanted to convey. It’s a very exciting poem — the idea of a poem based on the Apostles’ Creed might not sound exciting to us nowadays, but I can assure you, this is an exciting, dynamic poem.     

To come to the Octonaries — it has been suggested in the past that these might have been written by her husband. The problem is that while we have some wonderful letters in Scots prose by Bartilmo, we don’t have any vernacular verse. Many university-educated people, when they wrote poetry (and many did), they wrote in Latin. Esther, on the other hand, probably did not have Latin verse-writing skills; they were much rarer for women. But we know that she read poetry in both languages, and these poems are such accurate translations of the French, that although I’m quite sure that Bartilmo knew French and probably spoke it very well, this is the work of a bilingual native speaker. It is the work of somebody with a native speaker’s understanding of the French original. 

ANP: So, what can you say to us about Esther Inglis’ poetic style; when we look at the literary output that she left us with, what kind of different features does it demonstrate?    

JRB: Esther Inglis’ tiny output of verse demonstrates real mastery of standard poetic techniques. Some of it is not original; the largest piece of work we have in Scots (or Anglo-Scots would be a better term) is her verse translation of the Octonaires sur la vanite et inconstance du monde. These are very accurate translations which would be a useful and impressive thing in itself, but she also manages to keep, in most of them, the sometimes quite complex French rhyme schemes — because these fifty poems are not all written in the same way. The one thing they all have in common is that they are “octonaires”; they are eight-line poems. And she does make a real effort to keep as much as she can of the actual rhyme scheme and structure of the poems, the different meters that are used, as well. She doesn’t always succeed in maintaining that, but she does manage to maintain a high poetic register throughout. So it’s a big question, why are there only three copies of this rather wonderful translation, these great poems, and why did she prefer to copy the French original — there are three copies of the Anglo-Scots paraphrase that she made, and there are at least ten copies of the French original. Her love of these poems betokens her extremely good taste in poetry, I must say; these are great poems in French. Her other big poem is also in French; it is (I think) an original poem that she composed. It is, one could say, as a poetic style, it is a Protestant verse; it’s a polemical meditation on the Apostles’ Creed, sometimes just paraphrasing the words of the Apostles’ Creed, sometimes greatly expanding on particular articles out of the twelve articles that comprise the Apostles’ Creed. But again, it’s written with real mastery. There is no doggerel; there is no loss of the particular register that she wants to keep, and in my experience of Protestant poetry, particularly in English and in Scots, banality, doggerel, and bathos can be quite a feature. This is a poem that reflects really quite high aesthetic standards. It’s not just the content that matters; she has a poetic care for the expression.