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125 of 128 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Strife of Love in a Dream, December 19, 2000
Dr Joscelyn Godwin, musicologist author of that most excellent book on the music of the spheres "Harmonies of Heaven and Earth" claimed that Hypnerotomachia was one of the most significant and highly prized books of the Renaissance, so I simply had to experience this for myself. I've been plugging away at it now for almost 9 months, and nothing yet has happened. And evidently, that's the way it should be. This is a dream book. An insomniac's delight. It moves as slowly through its obsessive descriptions of the monuments, carved architectural ornaments, jewelled clothing, and occassional naked limbs of Parnassus as fruit ripening in perpetual springtime. It's a trick: A cure for lost love and reconciliation with the unattainable. And if you're having trouble remembering your own dreams, Hypnerotomachia might just help you develop the an inner language of words, symbols, and images to bridge waking and sleeping realities. The publisher Thames & Hudson has done an exemplary job fabricating a beautiful presentation volume, reproducing all of the engravings and typogography of the original. This is truly a book of substance: a 486 page artifact of sturdy paper weighing in at 6 lbs! (A small warning: even though Dr Godwin gives such thorough and helpful background information at the beginning, as well as charts and appendices for translation of the Latin and Greek phrases and Goddess names, do yourself the favor of avoiding p xiii, wherein the ending is blithly given away). How to rate this book? It's not for everyone. Masons might like it. Lutenists maybe. And night owls. I'm glad I bought mine. Though I must say it took awhile getting used to reading an adjective with every noun without laughing, and descriptions of marvels never stop short of superlative ("Their hair wafted gracefully, splendidly curled in many ringlets, made with an art and artistry that outdid every lascivious design and every nymphal voluptuousness..." to pick one at random). Nevertheless, Hypnerotomachia, stopping at every leaf, stone, flower, and ringlet, has been working its slow magic, imparting a direct sense of a certain kind of highly refined Renaissance imagination. I look forward to it at night as a comfort and perhaps a key. And as a physical entity in a world of dreams, a pleasure to handle.
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48 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Spirit of the Italian Renaissance Exemplified, August 30, 2002
Francesco Colonna's legendary "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili" is a book that captures the spirit of its time and place in a way few others do. Here, in the magical dream of the hero Poliphilus, we see classical antiquity through the eyes of the Italian renaissance, and it is not the view most students of the classics get today through Aristotle or Cicero - think instead of the Corpus Hermeticum, Neoplatonists like Plotinus, or of later Latin writers like Apuleius. It is not only in its text but in its format, its typesetting, and its illustrations, that the original edition of 1499 exemplified its age. That edition is esteemed by bibliophiles and students of typography as one of history's great landmarks in the art of book making. The publishers of this edition have tried to reproduce, as much as is possible, the feeling of the original, while at the same time producing it on a commercially feasible scale. This leads, inevitably, to some compromises. The typesetting is very well done by modern digital techniques, the presswork is standard offset lithography and the paper a stiff dead white wove offset grade. Consequently the tactile character of the book is quite unlike original fifteenth- and sixteenth-century books. A private-press printer like Mardersteig's Officina Bodoni, or even a high-grade commercial book printer like the Stinehour Press, could have done a handsomer and more authentic job, but the book's price, already high, would then have been stratospheric. This said, the size and appearance of the pages are about as close in their resemblance to the original as is feasible using the techniques employed. A cream laid paper, more closely resembling the original, could just as easily and as economically have been used, and it is a pity that it was not. The translation by Prof. Joscelyn Godwin is careful, and is preceded by an informative translator's preface. While the translator disavows trying to imitate the style of the original too faithfully, his work has a distinct "flavor" which struck me as familiar. It was only after some time that I realized where I had encountered it before - in some of the writings of Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo), for example, "Don Tarquinio." This may be a clever and deliberate device, like William Ernest Henley's translation of François Villon's "Tout aux tavernes & aux filles" into the slang of a cockney jailbird of the 1890s. On the other hand, it may well be that both Godwin's and the Corvine mannerisms go back to the common source, and attempt to reflect in English the peculiar voice of this Italian renaissance author, whose work was published in the time and place for which the eccentric æsthete Corvo felt such nostalgia and admiration.
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53 of 56 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Gods, and bulls, and naked Greeks, August 8, 2001
This is fascinating. It attempts not only to translate Colonna's mixed Latin/Italian texts, but also to reproduce the look and feel of the original 1499 Aldine edition. Of course, all the woodcuts are there, and the typeface and layout also attempt to reproduce the original, which has long been famed as one of the most beautiful books ever printed. The architectural and other illustrations are strange, but they are perhaps the most intriguing thing about the book. Some are reminiscent of Beardsley; others bring to mind Baudelaire's vision of a city made entirely of marble and metal, from which all plants have been banished as asymmetrical.
It will take quite a while to get through this. The peculiar mixed-language flavour of Colonna's prose is hard to reproduce in translation. The work is a long list of vaguely erotic dream-processions of gods and bulls and naked Greeks, with extensive descriptions of the architectural settings they appear in. With its unsparing strings of superlatives, it often reads like the florid descriptions of dishes found on the menu of an overreaching restaurant.
In other words, I may not finish this, but it is fun to look at.
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