THE DESCRIPTION OF THE WORLD, ADDITIONAL NOTE •III•
A NOTE ON CHAPTER i 5 2
The chapter on Quinsai (152) is in itself one of the most interesting and important in the book, and is of special interest with regard to the relation of the texts of R and Z. The chapter comes well after the ` certain moment ' after which we find, according to BENEDETTO, the text of F faithfully and completely translated in Z, and after which the copyist ` could not sacrifice a word . The chapter may be divided into sixty sections of uneven length, according to the subjects. Of these 6o sections, F has 31, Z 24, R 57. F has 12 sections which are not in Z. Z has 5 which are not in F ; 3 which are not in R. R has 26 which are not in F ; 34 which are not in Z. Z,R have 2 short sections in common which are not in F. Apart from its 5 extra sections, Z follows the order of F exactly and the words very nearly ; the order of R differs considerably from that of F,Z. Notable among the sections is No. 54, the Palace. In F it contains about 265 French words ; Z following very closely has 168 Latin ; R has about 690 Italian words, and differs so much in matter that BENEDETTO rightly prints the whole section, after the first few words, as an addition to F. In this most interesting chapter then the copyist of Z translated F faithfully but not at all completely, leaving out 12 sections of the present 31, and, if he had anything like the original of R before him, was so far from being unable to sacrifice a word that he sacrificed something like 500 in this one section about the Palace. The important point for the present purpose is to notice that Z, copying according to BENEDETTO'S suggestion from an original similar to that used by R, has produced an account of the Palace so much like that in F, changing io to 6, and omitting the i0000 (in both which points F happens to agree with R) and a few other words, but including some lines of word for word translation from F and not including, I think, a word from R which is not in F ; while R, on the other hand, using a similar original, has produced an account which, though no doubt two or three details of F can be found in it, is four times as long as F and differs so much in wording and matter that YULE, CHARIGNON, PENZER, BENEDETTO, and RIcci have all felt obliged to include it in their editions either as an addition to or as a substitute for the shorter account of F. That mere coincidence should have brought about this result is not very likely. We have, in fact, a long and important chapter in which Z, apart from two brief paragraphs, shows little or no consciousness of the many interesting additions which we owe to R ; while R is wholly unconscious of the three interesting sections which are found only in Z. It must not be forgotten that we know R only as part of a composite text made up by a comparatively modern editor, and this fact may account to some extent for the verbal differences which we find in it as well as for the changes in the order of the sections, but it cannot account for the difference of matter.
In the following Table of the sections into which, as has been said, the chapter may be divided, consecutive numbers, 1 to 6o, are put on the left side ; each section is given a name indicating the subject, together with the first and last words of the text, followed by a number which shows its position in F, Z, or R. Thus section 49 is the 23rd in F or Z, the 22nd in R ; 5o is the 24th in F, missing in Z, the 34th in R. The sections indicated make up together the whole chapter in each case (F,Z,R) with no omission except (in F) the last few words which introduce the next chapter.
IIIF Color HighRes
