Multiple words, multiple meanings, in the Hypnerotomachia

Abstract

The extraordinary style and extraordinary content of the Hypnerotomachia are as inseparable in its literary composition as the text and the illustrations in its typography. How can translation into English achieve a similar effect? Equally misconceived are grotesque hyperlatinisation, quite unlike either contemporary or modern Italian readers’ impression of the original, and a flat rendering down, losing much of the essence. The book challenged original readers reaching various levels of learning but as familiar with Latin as with the vernacular and ready to tackle this among rival answers to the questione della lingua. In many verbal coinages, for example combining Latin roots with Italian suffixes, or Italian roots with Latin suffixes, Latin is not the point: the English equivalent is analogous constructions from native materials. A hitherto overlooked characteristic, sometimes re-creatable in English, is how Poliphilo’s words are charged with double meanings, in three ‘types of ambiguity’: terms simultaneously bearing related senses, for example in ancient and modern, or general and technical usage; punning on independent homonyms; new portmanteau words bearing complex significance. Anyway, readers soon adapt to the lexicon, finding the real difficulty in the equally characteristic shapeless syntax. For Pozzi, this manifested Poliphilo’s antidynamic conception of language, phrases being juxtaposed like objects in a picture, not organised in periods temporally like music: an observation very important, and largely true. However, many passages vividly convey movement of the mind with oratorical figures and musical cadences. Rhetoric transcends frontiers between languages: a translator can, and should, reproduce it effectively in English.