国立情報学研究所 - ディジタル・シルクロード・プロジェクト
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The Book of Ser Marco Polo : vol.1 | |
マルコ=ポーロ卿の記録 : vol.1 |
ORIGINAL LANGUAGE OF THE BOOK
81
Emperor Kúblái, his court, wars, and administration. A series
of chapters near the close treats in a verbose and monotonous
manner of sundry wars that took place between the various
branches of the House of Chinghiz in the latter half of the 13th
century. This last series is either omitted or greatly curtailed in
all the copies and versions except one ; a circumstance perfectly
accounted for by the absence of interest as well as value in the
bulk of these chapters. Indeed, desirous though I have been to
give the Traveller's work complete, and sharing the dislike that
every man who uses books must bear to abridgments, I have
felt that it would be sheer waste and dead-weight to print these
chapters in full.
This second and main portion of the Work is in its oldest
forms undivided, the chapters running on consecutively to the
end.* In some very early Italian or Venetian version, which
Friar Pipino translated into Latin, it was divided into three
Books, and this convenient division has generally been adhered
to. We have adopted M. Pauthier's suggestion in making
the final series of chapters, chiefly historical, into a Fourth.
5 I. As regards the language in which Marco's Book was firs
committed to writing, we have seen that Ramusio assumed,
somewhat arbitrarily, that it was Latin ; Marsden Language
supposed it to have been the Venetian dialect ; Bal- oorigina'
delli Boni first showed, in his elaborate edition Work.
(Florence, 1827), by arguments that have been illustrated
and corroborated by learned men since, that it was French.
That the work was originally written in some Italian dialect
was a natural presumption, and slight contemporary evidence
can be alleged in its favour ; for Fra Pipino, in the Latin
version of the work, executed whilst Marco still lived, describes
his task as a translation de vulgari. And in one MS. copy of
the same Friar Pipino's Chronicle, existing in the library at
Modena, he refers to the said version as made " ex vulgari
idiomate Lombardico." But though it may seem improbable
that at so early a date a Latin version should have been made
at second hand, I believe this to have been the case, and that
some internal evidence also is traceable that Pipino translated
not from the original but from an Italian version of the original.
* 232 chapters in the oldest French which we quote as the Geographic Text (or G, T.), 200 in Pauthier's Text, 183 in the Crusca Italian.
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