by Robin Brown
Most introductions to a Marco Polo manuscript make a point of mentioning that he always made detailed notes to satisfy the Grand Khan’s love of minutiae and gossip. But this observation appears to have been emphasised later when the authenticity of the account was under heavy attack. I believe that Marco Polo did in fact have access to his notes; there is simply too much detail for the author to have remembered it all more than two years after his return to Venice.
Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s edition (c. 1553) is believed to be one of the earliest printed editions of a Marco Polo translation, if not the earliest. In it he describes how Marco languished in his prison in Genoa. Venice was actually at war with Genoa and the rich Polo family was called upon to equip a fighting galley. Marco sailed as the ‘merchant captain’ of this ship as part of an armada of some sixty vessels commanded by the fighting cleric Andrea Dandolo and fought in the battle of Curzola on 6 September 1298, which proved a diaster for Venice. Marco was carried as a prisoner to Genoa and accounts vary as to how long he was interred and why he was not exchanged for ransom money. Be it one year or three, captivity was wearisome and he talked a lot, finally attracting the attention of one Rustichello of Pisa, a romance writer who quickly ‘saw a book’ in Marco’s ramblings.
Some accounts have Rustichello as a fellow-prisoner in the Genoan gaol, but I consider it more likely that Rustichello was called in to ghost-write Marco’s book. The luck involved in finding a famous romance writer languishing in the same prison stretches credibility (even though by now credibility had already begun to stretch in several directions). The book which eventually came to be written is a product of Marco’s recollections of journeys undertaken anything from five to thirty years previously, and of Rustichello’s creative writing abilities, of which there is considerable evidence. Not for nothing was Marco later to be called ‘Marco Millione’ for what the public mostly regarded as innumerable tall stories. That said, his manuscript has in the main stood up remarkably well to seven hundred years of intense scholarly nit-picking, indeed as China has been explored new findings and details have, if anything, tended to corroborate his story.
As for his co-author, we learn that Rustichello was not an obscure Pisan gaolbird but a fairly eminent writer of his day who had enjoyed the patronage of Edward the Confessor and accompanied him on a Crusade to Palestine where he may even have met the Polos. He wrote a romanticised history of Arthur of Round Table fame, another on the battle of Troy and a biography of Alexander the Great, paying as much attention to the romance as to the history.
Polian scholars, in particular the éminence grise, Italian Professor L.F. Benedetto, have demonstrated that Marco’s invocation in his introduction to ‘Emperors and Kings, Dukes and Marquises’ to read the book is taken verbatim from Rustichello’s Arthurian romance. But this is no more than window-dressing. There was just one man and one alone who, in 1298, had been where no European had ever been before – and that man was Marco Polo.
The poet John Masefield, who was also a Polian scholar and wrote the fine introduction to the little 1908 Everyman edition entitled prosaically Travels: Marco Polo, speaks of Marco’s achievements as follows:
When Marco Polo went to the East, the whole of Central Asia, so full of splendour and magnificence, so noisy with nations and kings, was like a dream in men’s minds. Marco Polo saw her in all her wonder, more fully than any man has seen her since. His picture of the East is the picture which we all make in our minds when we repeat to ourselves those two strange words ‘the East’ and give ourselves up to the image which that symbol evokes. It makes us proud and reverent of the poetic gift to reflect that this king (Kublai), ‘the lord of lords’, ruler of so many cities, so many gardens, so many fishpools, would be but a name, an image covered by the sands, had he not welcomed two dusty travellers, who came to him one morning from out of the unknown.
With the arrival of the printing press we would do better to think of Marco Polo’s story as a wondrous exotic plant, changing colour, changing shape, growing new leaves, petals, twigs and branches; suffering light and heavy pruning and in some cases, bonsai.
The original manuscript is gone, lost irrevocably. There is no trace of the original handwritten document which Rustichello penned in rough French in their prison cell. And I would argue that the plant was growing even then. Can you not hear Rustichello, with his leanings towards romantic fiction, suggesting that the story would read better if this point was emphasised or that made a little more weighty? Then he must have taken it out of the prison, this great jumble of dictation, and edited it, probably in a great hurry and without much consultation with the author. The book was apparently ready in three months.
From the very beginning the seeds of change were planted – and how they have flourished!
In 1928 Professor Benedetto published a long and learned quantification, which included a validating count, of the various Marco Polo translations. An earlier count had been attempted by the famous English scholar Henry Yule, who listed a startling seventy-eight different versions. But the Benedetto count (which the author rather ironically published under the title Marco Polo: Il Millione) took the total up to 138. Of these 138 translations (the figure is certainly higher now) no two are the same. In addition there are literally hundreds of associated works, explaining, exploring, supporting and debunking that original manuscript. A manuscript, remember, which no longer exists.
Plotting Polo has become a science (and sometimes a black art) in itself and it is arguable whether these acres of scholarly exam-ination have helped the true story emerge. The wheat of this incredible tale has become blurred in a veritable cloud of academic chaff. With the best of good intentions, everyone who has ever picked up a Marco Polo manuscript has found reason to change it, or changed it without reason simply as a result of the application of nuances of common usage of the time. And this process has been happening in at least five major languages which in turn were translated into other languages and so on, and on. The very ancient (Alexandrian) Greeks were reported to have had a method for accurately copying handwritten manuscripts such as the early Christian writings known as the Kabra Negast. They would count the words of the original manuscript and find the middle word. Then they did the same with the copy and considered its middle word. If this word differed from the middle word of the original manuscript, you sharpened a new feather and started again from the beginning!
This level of precision has rarely, if ever, been applied to a Marco Polo manuscript other than perhaps with the very early ones of 700 years ago. And added to all the above is the effect of the phenomenon known as ‘Chinese whispers’. Statistically it has been shown that it is all but impossible to pass a whispered message accurately down a line of ten people. Taking that into account, it is nothing short of a miracle that after seven centuries of academic ‘whispering’ the Marco Polo texts we possess, while individually different (sometimes markedly different: the Ramusio, for example, is a third longer than the earliest translations), are all recognisable as the same work. Looked at positively we now have a rich kaleidoscope of interpretations each displaying its time’s seminal influences, mores, styles, accents and innuendos, yet all still sharing a common thread.
But there is no unravelling this cat’s cradle. The original reference work has vanished into the maw of time along with the knowledge of who made the first translation. Scholars have long since given up the search for this Holy Grail, consoling themselves with a very rough approximation of which early translation led to another.
But what of the essential story? Thankfully, the driving force of a very dramatic narrative has kept that essentially pristine. So far as I am aware, every version has Marco fighting his way through the desert of ‘Lop’ which takes thirty days to cross at its narrowest point and you should, too, be prepared to eat your pack animals and resist the blandishments of the ‘evil spirits . . . which amuse travellers to their destruction with the most extraordinary illusions’. Depending on which text you ar
e reading, that may, for example, come out as: ‘Euill fpirites, that make thefe foundes, amd alfo do call diuerfe of the trauellers by their names, and make them leave their company, fo that youfhall paffe this defert with great daunger’ (John Frampton, 1597). Or, some four hundred years later: ‘Spirits talking in such a way that they seem to be his companions . . . often these voices make him stray from his path so that he never finds it again’ (Ronald Latham, 1958).
Today scholars debate not so much the genesis of the text as the academic issues it raises, such as where Lop really was. With the help of modern explorers, they have long since decided it was the notorious Gobi; crossing it is every bit as hazardous today as it was in Marco Polo’s time, although global positioning satellites have largely exorcised the evil spirits.
A word in passing about the Frampton translation which I have referred to above and which has been one of my prime references. I decided early on that Marco Polo’s story was essentially a gutsy travelogue enlivened by the imagination of a very young man with all that entails. A lot of this flavour – juice, if you like – would have fallen foul of the religious probity of the early translators, who were all monks. But Frampton was an Elizabethan who suffered from no such inhibitions. In addition his translation, first published in the age of Shakespeare and the first in English, was taken from the Santaella, a manuscript of the Venetian recension or family and revealed by subsequent researchers such as Professor Benedetto to be one of the most important of the Polian books.
Overall there are five loose groups, called recensions, into which academia has gathered the classic translations of Marco Polo. They are essentially language groupings created by scholars, primarily Professor Benedetto, to bring some order to the chaos of the various manuscripts and their provenances.
The first recension, the Geographic Text, consists of just one volume – a French handwritten manuscript first published in 1824 by the French Geographical Society. It is extremely old, thought to come from the library of the French kings at Blois, and is widely regarded by the experts as the closest to the original that we have. As a result the experts, again led by Professor Benedetto, have subjected the manuscript to particularly close scrutiny to see if there are any clues to its age and authenticity. Specifically, he compared the other writing of Rustichello to the French manuscript. Some of Rustichello’s other writings, romances based on French Arthurian legends, have survived. Since Benedetto’s painstaking research revealed practically identical phrases and idioms in the two works, he concluded that the same care and diligence that produced the romances had also produced the Geographic Text. And he makes an even more dramatic claim, that Rustichello did not copy down at Marco Polo’s dictation but produced the Geographic Text (or maybe a version, of which that manuscript is a descendant) after a prolonged and detailed study of all the notes that Marco Polo supplied to him. Professor Benedeto argued:
Compito espresso de Rustichello dev’ essere stato quello di stendere in una lingua letteraria acceptabile quelle note che Marco, vissuto cosi’ a lungo in oriente, non si sensitive di formulare con esattezza in nessuna parlata occidentale. Abbiamo intravisto abbastanza com’ egli, assovendo un tal compito, si rimasto fedele allo stile ed alla visuale dei romanzi d’avventura. Ma non possiamo dire nulla di piu.
Or, in other words, Marco Polo was not a trained writer and after being so long away in the East he did not trust his ability to tell his story in a style acceptable to Western readers. He had been provided with a professional storyteller: it made sense to supply Rustichello with all the information and leave him to write up the story.
But this hypothesis widened rather than narrowed the academic debate. Other scholars (Sir Henry Yule among them) compared the texts and decided that the Geographic Text was much cruder, more inaccurate and more Italianised than Rustichello’s romances. They noted that the narration had a halting style, which supported the theory that it had been dictated. Moreover, the man who enjoys the reputation of being Marco Polo’s first print-editor, Giovanni Battista Ramusio, does not support this theory. He produced three volumes of travellers’ tales, published between 1556 and 1559, and covers Marco Polo’s journey in the last of these. In his introduction, Ramusio does not specify that Rustichello was Pisan, or that he took the account down as dictation; he simply says that Marco Polo was assisted by a Genoese gentleman ‘who used to spend many hours daily in prison with him’. Which rather suggests that Professor Benedetto may be half-right in his claim that Marco Polo lacked confidence in his skills as a writer and called in a professional. I personally doubt the claim that Rustichello was given notes and went away to write up the story on his own. We have no firm evidence that Marco Polo worked from notes, and even if he did they would not have covered the story’s wealth of detail. Marco Polo must have recounted, or dictated, a lot of his material from memory. Some of the stories, like that of the Old Man of the Mountains, sound as if they were remembered rather than transcribed from detailed notes. On the other hand, there are many who think that the tale of the Old Man of the Mountains was pure contrivance on Rustichello’s part, thinking the book needed a bit of sex at this point.
So about the best that can be said of the Geographic Text is that it is one of the earliest manuscripts, perhaps the earliest extant manuscript but probably not copied from the original. Unfortunately, it is also famously awkward and tautologous and as such has never been the manuscript of choice for subsequent translators.
Next in the list of recensions is the famous Gregoire Version. For a time this was thought to be simply a translation of the Geographic Text, but when examined word by word, some of the lacunae (the gaps) were markedly different. The version is now thought to be a translation of a ‘brother’ version of the Geographic Text, long since lost. The Gregoire bred fifteen versions of its own. And remember, no two translations are entirely the same!
At the beginning of the fourteenth century a Franco-Italian translation gave rise to what is known as the Tuscan Recension. There are five copies still in existence, of which the most famous is housed in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence where it is much adored as the Codex della Crusca. The group also contains a Latin translation by one Pipino, which corrupts the Tuscan translation but is largely responsible for Marco Polo’s name being known worldwide. Fra Pipino wrote the first best-seller based on Marco Polo’s story. In itself it became the subject of several translations and what might be termed the first modern editions of Marco Polo’s incredible journey; the basis of H. Murray’s well-known English translation of 1844, and a translation by the French Geographical Society in 1824.
Sadly, Marco Polo’s story has become fragmented in the various translations of the Tuscan Recension and even when taken together they still lack some historico-military chapters. Students use the Tuscan Recension manuscripts to correct corruptions in the Geographical Text.
The fourth on the list, the Venetian Recension, is widely regarded as the most important grouping and contains over eighty manuscripts, of which the Santaella is one. Most important of them is the Casanatense ‘Fragment’, which is believed to be directly descended from the prototype manuscript. As the name implies, it falls short of a complete telling of the tale but has an important pedigree because it served as the source of Fra Pipino’s famous version. Pipino’s inference that he worked from the actual Marco Polo prototype spawned innumerable copies of his work; some fifty classic editions in French, Irish, Bohemian, Portuguese and German, and five ‘popular’ ones or, as one commentator described them, ‘in the vulgar tongue’.
The Santaella represents a side road off the Tuscan Recension, probably a brother to the five original volumes which are the most important in this group. Two brothers in fact. There is a Venetian version housed at Lucca of seventy-five pages, which has a last page stating that it was completed on 12 March 1465 by one Daniel da Verona, and a Spanish (Castilian) version, Frampton’s Santaella, of seventy-eight unpaginated folios, which has a very interesting history.
; This manuscript lived at Seville’s Biblioteca del Colegio Mayor de Santa Maria de Jesus until 1791 when the college and the university were split. The manuscript vanished without trace and was feared lost. Years later it was discovered in the garret of an old building belonging to the college and found its present home at the Biblioteca del Seminario, in Seville. It is a very complete version of one hundred and thirty-five chapters published on 20 August 1493, some two hundred years after Marco Polo’s death, which makes it among the oldest of the printed classical Marco Polo manuscripts. All the Santaella editions are of extreme rarity but there is one, printed in 1529 and housed at the British Museum, which some believe is the actual copy used by John Frampton when he made the first translation into Elizabethan English some forty years later.
Frampton’s manuscript is almost as rare as its prototype with just three copies in existence. Frampton himself is as intriguing a character as the strange sequence of events that caused him to turn to a Spanish prototype when he decided to introduce Marco Polo to the Elizabethans. It has been suggested that he might even have been a commercial spy for Britain.
That Frampton spoke and read excellent Spanish is confirmed by comparing his translation with the Santaella. It is very accurate. The Santaella itself is also regarded as a sophisticated translation from the early Venetian Recension so Frampton made a good choice of source material. Between 1577 and 1581 he produced six long works, all translations from Spanish manuscripts – and all of a particular genre. They concerned themselves exclusively with the fruits of the vast Spanish trading empire, for which England at that time was virtually at war.
Contrary to popular belief it was not John Lane and Francis Drake who introduced the British to the joys of tobacco but John Frampton in the book that preceded his Marco Polo translation called Joyfull Newes. The joyful news contained in these pages was a description of all the medicinal plants the Spanish had found in the New World as well as ‘the rare and fingular virtues of diverfe and sundrie hearbes, trees, oyles, plantes and ftones, with their applications, af well for phificke as chirugerie’.