Polo, Marco. Travels of Marco Polo. Edited by Morris Rossabi. Sterling Signature, 2012.
Reason read: Marco Polo died in the month of January. Read in his memory.
Travels of the World or The Description of the World as it is known in Europe, details Marco Polo’s 1271 journey from Venice to China and back again. through Jerusalem, Armenia, the Gobi Desert, around the Sumatran coast and India and the Black Sea and through Constantinople. The sad thing is that Polo’s original work did not survive time. His exact words are lost forever. These days, more than one hundred versions of Travels of Marco Polo exist. Each version altered the details of the original and like a game of telephone, it is hard to tell what is true to Polo’s narrative and what has been embellished or exaggerated beyond recognition. The details are fuzzy and key figures and geography are confused. Nevertheless, the world owes a debt of gratitude towards fellow prisoner Rusticello da Pisa for collaborating with Polo to document the traveler’s exploits in the first place. There is no debating its influence. It is rumored that Christopher Columbus and Samuel Taylor Coleridge both were inspired by the travels of Marco Polo.
If you are going to pick up any version of Travels of Marco Polo, make sure you consider the version translated by Henry Yule (1971) and revised by Henri Cordier (1903) with the Morris Rossabi introduction and afterword. The maps by Karl Ryavec and Tim Collins are beautiful. You just have to get passed the “you must know” refrain that is common throughout the text.
As an aside: the more things change, the more they stay the same. In 1271 Marco Polo was given “Golden Tablets of Authority” which secured passage through a king’s dominions – a passport of sorts.
Favorite line, “But why should I make a long story out of it?” (p 245).
Author fact: Marco Polo was a mere seventeen years old when his father and uncle decided to take him on their next adventure.
Book trivia: Travels of Marco Polo is also known as Description of the World.
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “China: the Middle Kingdom” (p 60). Interestingly enough, Pearl indexes the British version while I read the American version.
~*LunaSea*~ 