Volume 7, Number 4 · September 22, 1966
Moonshine
By D.P. Walker
Kepler's Dream
by John Lear. with the full text of Somnium, Sive Astronomia Lunaris Joannis Kepleri, translated by Patricia Frueh Kirkwood
University of California, 182 pp., $5.00
There is every reason to welcome English translations of any of Kepler's works, and in particular of his Somnium seu Opus posthumum de Astronomia Lunari (1634), which is not even available in the critical edition of Kepler's works by Max Caspar and others, but only in the nineteenth-century edition of Frisch. Except for a recent edition of his Snowflake (Clarendon Press, 1966) and a translation (1965) by Edward Rosen of his Conversation With Galileo's Sidereal Messenger (Dissertatio cum Nuncio Sidereo), neither of them major works, none of Kepler's works has been completely translated into English; and his Latin is by no means easy. The Somnium was in the press when Kepler died in 1630. He had written the text of the dream itself in 1609, and it had circulated in manuscript. In about 1621 he began to annotate it copiously—the notes are four times as long as the text. It was published together with a letter to Paul Guldin, S.J., on lunar geography, and Kepler's Latin translation of Plutarch's On the Face in the Moon, also annotated, which unfortunately is not included in the translation under review.
Review, 2506 words
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