French - Italian - Pipino's Latin - Portuguese? - Grynaeus's
Latin - French![12]
[Sidenote: Fourth; Ramusio's Italian.]
60. IV. We now come to a Type of Text which deviates largely from any of
those hitherto spoken of, and the history and true character of which are
involved in a cloud of difficulty. We mean that Italian version prepared
for the press by G. B. Ramusio, with most interesting, though, as we have
seen, not always accurate preliminary dissertations, and published at
Venice two years after his death, in the second volume of the Navigationi
e Viaggi.[13]
The peculiarities of this version are very remarkable. Ramusio seems to
imply that he used as one basis at least the Latin of Pipino; and many
circumstances, such as the division into Books, the absence of the
terminal historical chapters and of those about the Magi, and the form of
many proper names, confirm this. But also many additional circumstances
and anecdotes are introduced, many of the names assume a new shape, and
the whole style is more copious and literary in character than in any
other form of the work.
Whilst some of the changes or interpolations seem to carry us further from
the truth, others contain facts of Asiatic nature or history, as well as
of Polo's own experiences, which it is extremely difficult to ascribe to
any hand but the Traveller's own. This was the view taken by Baldelli,
Klaproth, and Neumann;[14] but Hugh Murray, Lazari, and Bartoli regard the
changes as interpolations by another hand; and Lazari is rash enough to
ascribe the whole to a rifacimento of Ramusio's own age, asserting it to
contain interpolations not merely from Polo's own contemporary Hayton, but
also from travellers of later centuries, such as Conti, Barbosa, and
Pigafetta. The grounds for these last assertions have not been cited, nor
can I trace them. But I admit to a certain extent indications of modern
tampering with the text, especially in cases where proper names seem to
have been identified and more modern forms substituted. In days, however,
where an Editor's duties were ill understood, this was natural.
[Sidenote: Injudicious tamperings in Ramusio.]
61. Thus we find substituted for the Bastra (or Bascra) of the older
texts the more modern and incorrect Balsora, dear to memories of the
Arabian Nights; among the provinces of Persia we have Spaan (Ispahan)
where older texts read Istanit; for Cormos we have Ormus; for
Herminia and Laias, Armenia and Giazza; Coulam for the older
Coilum; Socotera for Scotra. With these changes may be classed the
chapter-headings, which are undisguisedly modern, and probably Ramusio's
own. In some other cases this editorial spirit has been over-meddlesome
and has gone astray. Thus Malabar is substituted wrongly for Maabar in
one place, and by a grosser error for Dalivar in another. The age of
young Marco, at the time of his father's first return to Venice, has been
arbitrarily altered from 15 to 19, in order to correspond with a date
which is itself erroneous.
