Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream - Hardcover

Colonna, Francesco

3.98

375 ratings by Goodreads

9780500019429: Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0500019428 ISBN 13: 9780500019429

Publisher: THAMES HUDSON, 1999

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The first, complete, English-language translation in five hundred years of one of the world's most compelling fantasies. It is hard to believe that one of the most famous books in the world, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, read by every Renaissance intellectual and referred to and revered in studies of art and culture ever since, has never appeared in full in English. One reason, no doubt, is the length and difficulty of the text. It is a strange, pagan, pedantic, erotic, allegorical, mythological romance relating in highly stylized Italian the quest of Poliphilo for his beloved Polia. The author (presumed to be Francesco Colonna, a friar of dubious reputation) was obsessed--one might say sexually obsessed--by architecture, and the book's 174 woodcuts are a primary source for Renaissance ideas on both buildings and gardens. In 1592 a beginning was made to produce an English version but the translator gave up part way. Now, at last, the task has been triumphantly performed by Joscelyn Godwin, who succeeds in reproducing all the wayward charm and arcane learning of the book in language accessible to the modern reader. Printed in the same size and format as the original, the book includes all the woodcuts and has a substantial introduction by Professor Godwin. Its appearance is a publishing event, filling a notorious gap in every academic library, in the collections of scholars, and on the bookshelves of everyone interested in the history of Western culture.

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About the Author:

Joscelyn Godwin is Professor of Music at Colgate University. He has made a considerable contribution to occult philosophy through his books on the seventeenth-century mystical writers Robert Fludd and Athanasius Kircher, as well as on the mystery religions of the ancient world and on the spiritual dimension of music.

Review:

During December of 1499 in Venice, Aldus Manutius finished printing Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream, a brilliantly designed folio filled with elaborate engraved plates that may have bankrupted its publisher and has nearly bankrupted collectors ever since. ...It is hard to think of any book quite so sensuous. It intoxicated European writers for two centuries, although few were so foolish as to try imitation, for Colonna invented his own language, an Italian so crammed with words borrowed from recondite Latin sources that it bewildered even his learned countrymen. At last, Joscelyn Godwin, a professor of music at Colgate University known widely for studies of ancient mystical religions, provides the first clear English version. No translation, if it is to be useful, could reproduce the effect of the original, but Godwin gives a hint, rendering a small passage literally and hilariously. -- The New York Times Book Review, D.J.R. Bruckner, 26 December 1999

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