The Book of Ser Marco Polo : vol.1 / Page 219 (Color Image)

0219	The Book of Ser Marco Polo : vol.1

ORIGINAL LANGUAGE OF THE BOOK

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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