Published in 1981, Codex Seraphinianus is described as an encyclopedia of an imaginary world, and what it would feel like to experience such a world as you go through the pages.
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Its author, Luigi Serafini, is a surrealist artist who spent two and a half years drawing the images and then later, coming up with the language to go with them. Needless to say, he intentionally made the language untranslatable, to further drive the point that the book is trying to make. In his own words, he wants to induce the experience of reading something without exactly knowing how to read it or what you’re reading.
It sort of hearkens to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland wherein everything seems, to an outsider, so strange and bizarre. The lyrics from the original Willy Wonka film captures the spirit of Serafini’s book, it’s a world of pure imagination.
But inasmuch as the images in the book are so otherworldly, there’s also a sense of familiarity as it doesn’t exactly invent things that are new from the perspective of reality. It’s just a hodgepodge of different things, like a thought experiment visualized.
The appeal is definitely in that dynamic between the surreal and the real. Couple that with an indecipherable conlang, and you have a tome that’s sure to whet the appetites of curious minds.
And I think, that is at the heart of the matter. Codex Seraphinianus wants to stir our imaginations and draw creativity at the forefront. I think it wants us to feel that excitement when you see something for the first time, and have the nagging feeling of wanting to understand it, like an itch that you just have to scratch. Just like Wonderland or the Chocolate Factory, it wants to ignite that sense of wonder in us once again.
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Here’s a brief overview of what’s inside Codex Seraphinianus.
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Source: neatorama