Product Description

One of the most famous books in the world, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, read by every Renaissance intellectual and referred to in studies of art and culture ever since, was first published in English by Thames & Hudson in 1999 in a large format that exactly matched the original in size, design, and typography. Now this classic study is made available to a wider public in a reduced-format volume that retains all the text and illustrations.

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 by architecture, landscape, and costume—it is not going too far to say sexually obsessed—and its 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 partway. The task has been triumphantly accomplished by Joscelyn Godwin, who succeeds in reproducing all its wayward charm and arcane learning in language accessible to the modern reader. 174 b/w illustrations.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #517620 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 476 pages

From Library Journal
Published in 1499, this standard of the Renaissance is here translated for the first time into English. The text apparently is difficult, and earlier efforts to produce an English-language text were abandoned. Essentially a romance, this tells the story of protagonist Poliphilo's quest for the love of Polia. More for hard-core academic collections, especially at this price.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, D.J.R. Bruckner, 26 December 1999
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.

Choice
[T]here may be nothing better.... The long-awaited and very readable translation of a curious Renaissance book.

Customer Reviews

Tiresome, Slow - but Mind-Expanding?
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.

Inspiration of the Rule of Four
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..."

Unread
I havent read this book as of yet, but I am replying to a reader who was wonering how the pronounce the title. Taken from www.ruleoffour.com: "Since its publication in 1499, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (pronounced Hip-ner-AH-toe-mak-ee-a Poh-LI-fi-ly) has baffled scholars who have tried to unveil its many mysteries."