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| The Book of Ser Marco Polo : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
I
RAMUSIO'S ITALIAN VERSION
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Text, a passage in which the term Roi des Pe/allies, or " King
of Furs," is applied to the Sable, and which in the Crusca has
been converted into an imaginary Tartar phrase Leroide pela;ne,
or as Pipino makes it Rondes (another indication that Pipino's
Version and the Crusca passed through a common medium).
But Ramusio exhibits both the true reading and the perversion :
" E Tartari la chiamano Regina delle pelli " (there is the true
reading), "E gli animali si chiamano Rondes " (and there the
perverted one).
We may further remark that Ramusio's version betrays
indications that one of its bases either was in the Venetian
dialect, or had passed through that dialect ; for a good many
of the names appear in Venetian forms, e.g., substituting the
z for the sound of cll, j, or soft g, as in Goza, Zorzania,
Zagatay, Gonza (for Giogiu), Quenzanfu, Coi anzu, Tapinzu,
Zipangu, Zianiba.
64. To sum up. It is, I think, beyond reasonable dispute
that we have, in what we call the Geographic Text, as nearly as
may be an exact transcript of the Traveller's words as
Summary in
originally taken dawn in the prison of Genoa. We Té t ofo
have again in the MSS. of the second type an edition Polo.
pruned and refined, probably under instructions from Marco
Polo, but not with any critical exactness. And lastly, I believe,
that we have, imbedded in the Ramusian edition, the supple-
mentary recollections of the Traveller, noted down at a later
period of his life, but perplexed by repeated translation,
compilation, and editorial mishandling.
And the most important remaining problem in regard to the
text of Polo's work is the discovery of the supplemental manu-
script from which Ramusio derived those passages which are
found only in his edition. It is possible that it may still
exist, but no trace of it in anything like completeness has yet
been found ; though when my task was all but done I dis-
covered a small part of the Ramusian peculiarities in a MS. at
Venice.*
* For a moment I thought I had been lucky enough to light on a part of the missing original of Ramusio in the Barberini Library at Rome. A fragment of a Venetian version in that library (No. 56 in our list of MSS.) bore on the fly-leaf the title "Alcuni primi capi ciel Libro di S. Marco Polo, copiati Ball esemplare 7/aaraoscritto di PA OL O RANNUSIO." But it proved to be of no importance. One brief passade of those which have been thought peculiar to Ramusio ; viz,, the
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