PHILOLOGOS picks up the thread from last week on the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (in the Forward) and concludes that the Arabic was botched but the writer had some help with the Hebrew from an anonymous rabbi. Excerpts:

The Hebrew inscriptions tell a different story. Gloria Dei is felicitously translated astif'eret ha-el and Gloria Mundi as tif'eret ha-olam. The only unusual thing is the Hebrew of the middle portal � which, as we said last week, leads to the abode of Venus, the goddess of love. Although every educated Italian in Renaissance times knew Latin, few knew Greek; yet the Hebrew over this portal, gidul ha-ahavah, is translated not from the Latin Materamoris but from the Greek Erototrophos. Moreover, the translation itself is inexact, since gidul ha-ahavah means "the nourishment [or cultivation] of love," not "the nourisher of love." How are we to account for this?

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And yet, Colonna's Hebrew helper, who could have chosen between em ha-ahavah, "the mother of love," and megadelet ha-ahavah, "the nourisher of love," opted for a third, less literal alternative. There only could be one reason for this: the fact that he was a rabbi! In other words, while as an Italian Jew he was a man of the Renaissance, too, and had no objection to assisting a Christian in publishing a book containing nude and erotic illustrations, he drew the line at polytheism. If Colonna wanted to invoke the ancient Greek and Roman gods as part of his allegory of love's progress, that was his affair, but our rabbi was not about to desecrate the Holy Tongue by following suit. Possibly without even telling the author what he was doing, he therefore substituted "the nourishment of love" for "the nourisher of love" and kept the Hebrew free of pagan allusions.

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