FOREST POEMS

This section describes the ritual punishment for hunters who fail to use the correct technical terms for the hunt.

Rather than rashly corrupting the hunter's language,

Here, a mistake is a SACRILEGE.

original: "PIACULUM." In this context, it refers to a violation of the sacred traditions of the hunt which requires atonement. The guilty party surely falls into the mockery of the KNIFE,

Irritable, like a deity.

original: "CULTRI." This refers to a ritual where a hunter who used the wrong word was "knighted" or struck with the flat of a hunting knife as a humorous punishment. Though you try everything, you cannot escape the blade

Sacred to the goddess WIT.

original: "FACETIÆ." Balde personifies Wit or Humor as a goddess presiding over these social rituals. More worthy than the arrows of Apollo or the spear of Mars,

Than even the thunderbolt of the Thunderer.

The "Thunderer" is Jupiter. The poet jokingly suggests the hunter's knife is more significant in this setting than the weapons of the greatest gods. Every error is punished while the man is stretched over the Stag,

And he bears the harmless blows.

The grassy theater has long since shaken with laughter,

And roared with the surging of lungs.

A N T I T H E S I S .

An "Antithesis" in Balde's work often provides a counter-point or a philosophical reflection on the preceding section.

So it has come to this, that the woods boast a teacher of Rhetoric,

An eloquent PROTEUS of the fields!

Proteus was a sea god capable of changing his shape. Here, the hunter's language is compared to him because it is constantly changing or using specialized names for common things. Whose eloquence turns itself into all shapes,

Happy to invent new names.

We read that the Chaonian oaks breathed forth oracles,

But truly not just any tree.

The Chaonian oaks refer to the ancient Greek oracle of Zeus at Dodona, where the rustling leaves were interpreted as divine messages. If however this glory of a new language is granted

And used by Hunters:

Surely Patarean APOLLO will deny the same to his poets,

Oh, that stepfather!

Apollo is the god of poetry. "Patarean" refers to Patara, a city in Lycia famous for an oracle of Apollo. Balde jokingly calls him a "stepfather" (vitricus) if he allows hunters more linguistic freedom than poets. And yet I might be as suitable a creator of novelty,

As a half-wild man born in the countryside.

What will be given to the BARD, who will devise a thousand sounding words,

Polished, full, and grand,

Yet neither swollen, nor gaping, nor rough in their flow;

But masculine in the Attic style,

The "Attic style" refers to the refined, clear, and elegant Greek prose of Athens, which Balde contrasts with the rough jargon of the forest. And words that match the things they signify, in a single night

He will devise.

ENNIUS, sounding of arms, once said "taratantara":

With this word he had moved the camps.

Ennius was an early Roman poet. He famously used the onomatopoeia "taratantara" to mimic the sound of a trumpet blast in his poem "The Annals." I will dare no less, if what father ENNIUS drank,

It is better to keep silent about the rest.

Ennius was said to have been inspired by the spirit of Homer after a dream; he was also famously associated with a love for wine as a source of inspiration.