Many thanks to Ania for inviting me to be a guest author in this new blog. Look upon the latest addition to my abandoned book pile and weep, oh reader!
Astrology in The
Renaissance
The Zodiac of Life
Eugenio Garin
I returned home from my
two-week holiday in Italy raring to learn about astrology and its
place in Italian Renaissance society.
Back in the early 1500s, there
was not yet a complete split between Astrology and Astronomy and I had been
mesmerised by the astrological meridian in the Basilica of San
Petronio in beautiful Bologna. That there was something of such extraordinary esoteric beauty in the middle of a Basilica piqued my interest and I wanted to learn MORE.
Back home, I quickly ordered up
Astrology in the Renaissance from the Gods of Amazon and when it arrived, a scant 3 days later, I settled down in a corner of the sofa with my reading glasses and a
mug of coffee.
But, things did not begin terribly well...
When a book's opening
sentence is a ghastly 58 words long, I knew that I was in for a
bumpy, boring ride.
Am I being unfair? You
decide:
“It is almost a
commonplace of recent historiography that one could, in the
Renaissance, make a precise distinction in astrology between two
aspects which had previously, in antiquity and he Middle Ages, been
inextricably linked and were indeed frequently confused under the one
category 'astrology': the first being the religious and superstitious aspect and the second analytical and scientific.”
** shakes the reader
awake **
Maybe
I was just not in the right frame of mind, but the convoluted
sentences failed to engage me. I realised that I was reading and
re-reading the same paragraphs over and over again, trying to make
sense of them.
And
on and on it went in similar vein. Quotes were provided first in
their original Latin, and then followed in English. Some of the
quotes were quite long, so as my eyes increasingly danced across the
verbose pages, there were instances when I thought I had lost the
power to understand English at all.
I
abandoned Chapter 1 and headed straight into the Chapter on
Neoplatonism and hermeticism, but I was still baffled and – the
worst sin of all in a book – bored.
Number
of pages read before abandoning: nine pages of introduction and a
paltry six pages of Chapter 1.
To be
fair, there isn't a universe where something like 'neoplatonism and
hermeticism in astrology' is going to be easy to understand, but I
think that I might have had more fun trying to read the book in its
original Italian.
And
right there is, I feel, the reason that the book fails.
The
translation is, I'm sure, absolutely perfect grammatically – but it
has resulted in a work that is as difficult to digest as a bowl of
unripe bananas. Not only is it a translation, but it seems to have
been translated by a team of people – Carolyn Jackson, June Allen
and Clare Robertson.
Anything
done by committee consensus is usually troublesome :)
Still,
I'm not selling it. You never know – maybe one day I'll be smart
enough to read it and understand it :)
