Hypnerotomachia

I don’t recall when or how I first heard about the mysterious book Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Certainly by the mid-to-late ’90s I’d read a bit about it, not imagining that within a few years I’d come to own not one but two copies of the thing. The year 1999 marked the 500th anniversary of the book’s publication, with new editions forthcoming to mark the occasion.

First I got my hands on a 2-volume set issued by Adelphi Edizioni of Milan in 1998, in which vol. 1 (pictured above) contained a facsimile of the book, and vol. 2 (which I no longer have) a translation into modern Italian, introductory essays, and hundreds more pages of additional commentary. My rudimentary knowledge of Italian fell a long way short of my being able to read the text, so I was delighted when, the following year, Joscelyn Godwin’s complete English translation was issued by Thames & Hudson “in the same size and format as the original” (handier editions followed).

Finally able – in principle – to read the book, I then failed to reach the end of it. The narrator’s progress through a his dream-world, a kind of pagan paradise strewn with magnificent buildings and colossal ruins, gets to be numbingly repetetive when its fantastical architecture is described in virtually fetishistic detail. Even so, I’ve kept hold of these volumes: they look good on a shelf and maybe I’ll have a second go at traversing the text one of these years.