Customer Reviews

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Joscelyn Godwin's translation has made the entire text of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili readily available to an Anglophone readership for the first time in the book's 501-year history, bringing to light what was formerly the preserve of a few savants deeply knowledgable in Renaissance Italian language and culture. What has always been accessible, meanwhile, namely the book's singularly elegant design, which combined numerous innovations in the fields of typography, page layout and illustration, have been painstakingly emulated by Thames and Hudson, and their printers, for this edition. One suspects that this book has more often been admired as an artefact and consummate relic of its time, than enjoyed as a work of literature, but Godwin's translation, which deliberately smooths many of the original text's convolutions, offers many delights, and immerses us in Poliphilo's fervent dream. The body of the book relates the hero's progress through his dreamworld, a paradise strewn with magnificent buildings and colossal ruins whose architecture is described in loving, even fetishistic detail; and populated for the most part by comely nymphs wearing diaphanous gowns. On the simplest level, this is escapist fantasy, embodying the author's sensual longings, and beyond that are, I presume, levels of allegorical meaning not obvious to a casual reader such as myself. By no means does one need, however, to understand every sign and symbol, in order to derive great pleasure from reading this amazing work.

I've been hearing about the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili for yearsas some sort of mysterious work that inspired generations of artistsand writers. Original copies fetch enormous sums at auctions, and I'm glad that a complete modern edition has been produced for English speakers. Fortunately, Joscelyn Godwin didn't try to reproduce Francesco Colonna's difficult and idiosyncratic Italian in English, otherwise the book would have been as difficult to read as 'Ulysses' and needed another volume just for footnotes.

Modern readers have little patience with description, and that's the sort writing that makes up the bulk of the HP. There's a story of love that keeps the protaganist moving from scene to scene, but the descriptions and woodcuts are the life of the book. It could serve as a pattern book for artists, sculpters, woodcarvers, and furniture makers. The illustrations are beautifully done although esoteric and strange to the modern eye. The graceful prose makes this enormous book easy to read.

The binding and printing are top-form. The cover is full-cloth, and the reproductions of the woodcuts are clear. The paper is an easy-on-the-eyes cream color. The book is physically large and requires a slant-top reading table if one wants to read it for more than a few minutes. The size and quality of the HP reminds me that books once were valued objects rather than the cheap and disposable items they now mostly are...

The great success of The Rule of Four (Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason) made Francesco Colonna's book known to large numbers of readers who would not have heard of it otherwise; however famous the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili might have been to historians of renaissance literature it was hardly an everyday name to everyone else. It was inevitable, therefore, that any publisher with an English translation in its lists was going to bring out a popular edition for the potential new market.

And so it has proved. Thames & Hudson had produced a high-quality English edition as recently as 1999, and now offer a paperback edition at a much lower price, retaining the same high quality of paper and printing, but with a different page size. The book is set in Monotype Poliphilus, in principle the same typeface that was used by Aldus Manutius five centuries earlier for the original book. In principle only, however, as comparison with the facsimile from the original that is reproduced near the end of the book will show that the modern typeface is much less black in appearance - cleaner and lighter if you like the modern tendency, or paler and weaker if you don't. All of the original illustrations are included (including one that was accidentally omitted from the 1999 edition).

Joscelyn Godwin, the translator, decided to aim for clarity rather than a close representation of Colonna's style in English. For some readers this will be a disappointment, resulting in a pale shadow of the original, but if they want to understand what the book is about then it was probably inevitable. In the Introduction, Godwin gives a sample of what his translation might have looked like if he had tried to reproduce Colonna's style: "In this horrid and cuspidinous littoral and most miserable site of the algent and fetorific lake stood saevious Tisiphone, efferal and cruel with her viperine capillament, her meschine and miserable soul, implacably furibund". If that is the kind of thing you like to read you will certainly regard Godwin's version as a travesty, but if you want to get through the book you will probably prefer the text that he actually provides: "On this horrid and sharp-stoned shore, in this miserable region of the icy and foetid lake, stood fell Tisiphone, wild and cruel with her vipered locks and implacably angry..."

This is a wonderful translation of an extraordinary book. Nearly 500 pages of sensual detailed descriptions of fantasy architecture, gardens, and travels along with a short love story. Creates a whole other world. Fun to read aloud.

Imagine the most boring person in the world telling you about this "erotic" dream he had. As soon as he starts, you realize that to this guy "erotic" means "sensual" and he has a Medeival dread of his own sexuality. He spends hours meticulously describing every pebble, every stone, every crack in the architecture, every flower in the gardens, every thread of the costumes worn by the armies of lovely (but "virginal") nymphs he encounters along the way.
Out of the 466 pages of the hardcover 2nd edition, there is action on approximately 75 of them. The rest is lengthy and uninteresting description of the marvels Poliphilo sees in his dream. Everything is described in superlative terms, and the figure is repeated so often you can almost sing along with Poliphilo: "X such that was never seen/made/matched by Y." Where X is the thing described and Y is an obscure allusion to classical mythology or European lore of a person or place famous for its association with X or items like it. The classical allusions are so frequent and so obscure, the reader will need a guidebook probably twice as thick as the Hypnerotomachia itself in order to understand them all.
People prate of the beauty of this book, but ... I won't deny that the book itself, as a physical object, is quite beautiful, and the illustrations are interesting (however the women who are described in the text as "beautiful" are drawn sort of doughy with double chins and chubby baby-fat limbs.) But the average modern reader will not be able to slog through what must have been considered in the Renaissance to be an enchanting pageant of loveliness. The ceaseless barrage of adjectives and the narrator's simpering reluctance to ever take any sort of action will frustrate most members of a 21st-century audience.
This book is not without its merits, which are the reason I awarded it two stars. The first 150 pages are quite delightful, because things are actually happening in the story, the experience is still new, and the interminable tedium of the next 300 pages has not yet beaten the reader's brain into a catatonic state. The sumptuous banquet at the court of Queen Eleuterylida is a memorable highlight. There's an interesting scene right in the middle of the book, in which Poliphilo explores a ruined cemetery and reads epitaphs of unfortunate wights who died of love. Numerous descriptions of pagan rituals are interesting, if not accurate. The book is completely saturated with Greco-Roman paganism, which was a fad at the time it was written.
The act of reading the Hypnerotomachia can be rewarding in spite of, or perhaps because of its tedium. I forged onward with the grim determination that I would finish this book, no matter what ... my eyes rolled in my head as I fought off sleep, hypnotic streams of uninteresting adjectives reducing my awareness to a dreamlike state. I would read pages and afterwards have no memory whatsoever of what they had contained. Strange ideas and mental pictures emerged which seemed to come, not from the book, but from somewhere behind it. I found myself titllated by vivid erotic fantasies which seemed totally unrelated to what I was reading. Was this some sort of magic, intentionally worked by the author of the Hypnerotomachia, or was it my subconscious mind desperately trying to entertain itself in the face of such monumental dullness?
I recommend this book for anyone interested in a non-chemical psychedelic experience. But try to find it at the library, don't spend your hard-earned money.

Some years back, I had the incredible joy of handling a copy of the 1499 Aldine edition. The Thames & Hudson edition, it must be stated, does not have the powerful, almost magic, beauty only an original could have. It must also be stated, however, that this comes as close as any modern edition possibly could, with all the woodcuts and the typography intact: this book is magnificent. I commend it to all with any love for or interest in incunabula specifically or in the history of books in general.

The extraordinary care that was taken by the publisher in the production and design of this book goes beyond beauty. The weight, proportions, paper and typography are something like the experience of the original, or at least, of what the experience of reading was in the time of Colonna. This all helps illuminate the hallucinatory, allegorical text, and for this reader, I felt as if I was inhaling some kind of ether. What breathtaking insight this book provides into the sensibility and mileu of the Renaissance.