Anonymous alchemical poetry, which flourished during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in England, consisted of laboratory texts mainly concerning recipes and practical notes about the production of the philosophers’ stone or elixir. These texts, which are not part of the authoritative writings of the famous alchemists of the time, re-purposed the Opus in a prosaic and pragmatic way. They made use of the same mysterious lexicon of the well-known alchemical treatises, but they often revisited and modified it according to their own needs. Very little attention has been given to this body of writing or to the processes of adaptation of the original Latin figurative alchemical vocabulary during vernacular translation. This paper focuses on a particular lexical item related to a transmutative procedure identifiable in a collection of fifteenth-century English recipes for making the elixir. It highlights the strategy an anonymous writer employed to coin a metaphorical formula to describe cryptically the mysterious aqua mercurialis. This formula was handed down in a corpus of manuscripts without being fully understood by copyists and users. In fact, later translators, in rendering it from English into Latin, turned it into an unsuitable expression, which led to the loss of its semantic implications.

匿名炼金术诗歌在十四和十五世纪的英国盛行，由实验室文本组成，主要涉及有关点金石或长生不老药生产的配方和实用说明。这些文本不属于当时著名炼金术士的权威著作，但以一种平淡而务实的方式重新调整了作品的用途。他们使用了著名炼金术论文中相同的神秘词汇，但他们经常根据自己的需要重新审视和修改它。很少有人关注这些著作或在白话翻译过程中对原始拉丁比喻炼金术词汇的改编过程。本文重点关注与可在十五世纪英国制作长生不老药的食谱集中识别的嬗变过程相关的特定词汇项目。它强调了一位匿名作家所采用的策略，他创造了一个隐喻公式来神秘地描述神秘的水银。这个公式是在手稿中流传下来的，但没有被抄写者和使用者完全理解。事实上，后来的译者在将其从英语翻译成拉丁语时，变成了一种不合适的表达方式，导致其语义含义的丧失。