The book is written in an artificial language, which uses Italian grammar with words drawn from Latin, Tuscan and Greek, many of them totally made up, with Italian endings. There are also eighty epigrams and inscriptions, in Greek, Hebrew, Latin, mock hieroglyphs and ‘Chaldean’. It is the work of a cryptomaniac. Astonishingly HP has been translated into english, in part in 1592 (only a third of it), and in full in 1999 by an American academic, Joscelyn Godwin, Professor of Music at Colgate University, Hamilton, NY.
...
weirdly, the book’s erotic content is expressed most powerfully through buildings, which form a series of stages for the action. Indeed, buildings take up more than half the book, and no fewer than seventy-eight of the first eighty-six pages are descriptions of buildings or gardens. of the 172 engravings, eighty-eight are of buildings.
of:
“one of the craziest, most beautiful books ever printed”
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
(Poliphilo’s Struggle for Love in a Dream)
“nothing less than an architectural erotic fantasy”
(by anonymous - possibly one Brother Francesco Colonna)
page 228 & 230
The Gutenberg Revolution
by John Man
bantam books
isbn 978-0-55381-966-3
Have you heard of Esperanto :)
ReplyDeleteThink the choice of the future global language lies between Esperanto and English, rather than an untried project.
As a native English speaker, I would prefer Esperanto.
English is impractical because communication should be for all and not only for an educational or political elite. That is how English is used internationally at the moment.
Undemocratic, also, because minority languages are under attack worldwide due to the encroachment of majority ethnic languages. Even Mandarin Chinese is attempting to dominate as well. The long-term solution must be found and a non-national language, which places all ethnic languages on an equal footing is essential.
Your readers may be interested in http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8837438938991452670
A glimpse of Esperanto can be seen at http://www.lernu.net