Are the men in the news adults – or attention-seeking five-year-olds? All rights reserved. “There was an old growler called Alan, / Whose hypocrisy should merit a ban, / ‘Jail Boris!’ he cried, / But then Al’s integrity died, / And now he’s a lick-spittle Johnson fan.”. Dunbar, however, set the literary benchmark against Walter Kennedy (a fellow poet and Master of Arts at Glasgow University) for the court of James IV, employing an exhaustive compendium of alliteration, allusion, and altercation. Is it worth a petition? One especially memorable example of flyting is the 16th century exchange between William Dunbar and Walter Kennedy, performed for the court of Scottish King James IV, where Kennedy calls Dunbar, “a sh*t without a wit.” (That insult stands the test of time pretty darn well, if you ask me.) 1 For a discussion of Dunbar's use of alliterative conventions in his poetry, see A. But the history of flyting goes back farther than the 16th century. Flyting, (Scots: “quarreling,” or “contention”), poetic competition of the Scottish makaris (poets) of the 15th and 16th centuries, in which two highly skilled rivals engaged in a contest of verbal abuse, remarkable for its fierceness and extravagance.Although contestants attacked each other spiritedly, they actually had a professional respect for their rival’s vocabulary of invective. Your balls droop below your dress,” says Dunbar to Kennedy, in Kent Leatham’s translation. Flyting to vse richt gritly I eschame; For it is nowthir wynnyng nor rewaird, Bot tinsale baith of honour and of fame, Incres of sorrow, sklander and evill name. Quod Dumbar to Kennedy 4 Indeed, Dunbar's "Flyting" is claimed to mark the first use of "shit" as a personal insult in the Anglophonic canon. Inspired by his example, A. MacDonald, "Alliterative Poetry and Its Context: The Case of William Dunbar. Morgan’s response? I mean, it’s not the worst, but the scansion is miserable and rhyming Alan and “a ban” doesn’t really work. It isn’t hard to imagine that they were inspired by the efforts of Britain’s new prime minister Boris Johnson, who wrote a limerick about the president of Turkey having sex with a goat three years ago shortly before his appointment as foreign secretary. © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to InTranslation, where we feature English translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing from around the world. Dunbar belongs to a significant group of late-medieval Scottish poets who are generally known as the Middle Scots Poets or the Scottish Makars, a group that includes the author of, d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/conlee-dunbar-complete-works-introduction.