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Title: Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream by Francesco Colonna, Joscelyn Godwin ISBN: 0-500-51104-7 Publisher: Thames & Hudson Pub. Date: May, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.56 (9 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Colonna for the fourth grade reader.
Comment: An earlier reviewer remarked "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." The correct word is unfortunately. The present translation is a lifeless, dumbed down document. I wasted my money.
Rating: 4
Summary: The Spirit of the Italian Renaissance Exemplified
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: Gods, and bulls, and naked Greeks
Comment: 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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Title: The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance by Joscelyn Godwin ISBN: 1890482846 Publisher: Phanes Pr Pub. Date: November, 2002 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Epic and Empire by David Quint ISBN: 0691015201 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 25 January, 1993 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Michael Maier's Atalanta Fugiens: Sources of an Alchemical Book of Emblems by H. M. E. de Jong ISBN: 0892540605 Publisher: Nicolas-Hays, Inc. Pub. Date: February, 2002 List Price(USD): $80.00 |
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Title: Famous Women : by Giovanni Boccaccio, Virginia Brown ISBN: 0674011309 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: 30 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Renaissance Philosophy of Man: Petrarca, Valla, Ficino, Pico, Pomponazzi, Vives by Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, John H. Randall ISBN: 0226096041 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: June, 1948 List Price(USD): $17.50 |
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