So is Marco Polo a Good Read or Not? (review)

The Travels of Marco Polo The Venetian

(Description of the World)

Translated by W. Marsden, revised by T. Wright

Edited by Peter Harris

Introduction by Colin Thubron

Everyman’s Library, 2008 $29

Le Devisement du Monde by Marco Polo.
Edition Critique publiee sous la direction de Phillipe Menard.
Droz; Geneva, 2001 5 vol. $175

Having read Colin Thubron’ s glowing introductory essay for this edition when he first published it years ago in NYRB of what we used to call “The Travels of Marco Polo,” I was prepared to be transported to an enchanting faraway place or at least deeply impressed. As a former medievalist I was also prepared for a certain amount of rhetoric and boredom. In that essay, Thubron wrote,

Of all the travel sagas ever written, none is more richly astonishing than Marco Polo’s Description of the World. It records a land of such fabulous difference that to enter it was like passing through a mirror; and it is this passage…which gives the tale even now a dream-like quality. (ix)

Well, having read almost the entire book with notes, and intro (but not yet the appendix) I can say that while I found the book essential for someone like me interested in travel and medieval literature, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to a less dedicated reader than myself or even most general readers. I can't lie and tell you it's a page-turner because it's not.

The main reason for this is the prosaic quality of many of Polo’s episodes and his relentlessly factual approach to what he sees and does during his travels. He is not, as is Thubron for example, a visionary or poetic writer but very much a plodding “describer” as the original title implies.

But having said that, I can subscribe to the rest of Thubron’s enthusiastic endorsements of the great, seminal book behind so much of Western exploration and travel accounts. The single most important bit of information in Marco Polo’s travels is no doubt his splendid & detailed description and history of the reign of the Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan, bringing knowledge of China for the first time to the West. However, the Venetian Polo was a businessman first looking for buying and selling opportunities; he observed all of these new territories carefully, studying their economies, products, prices and markets. For the historian of economies, this is valuable stuff. Fortunately, there was another side to him—which was the observer of people, their governments, customs (including sexual mores) and religions. Another side of Polo was total fantasy but this is to be expected in medieval culture that was innocent of scientific or empirical methods.

The other area where Polo’s work is valuable is the field of comparative cultural studies, which aim at uncovering the ways Western cultures view and construct other cultures especially those of the East. After Foucault & Said, it is difficult not to look skeptically at the face value of statements made by Westerners about other cultures that differ radically from theirs, especially when dealing with those legendary places of the fabulous East, Africa and Islamic lands about much was imagined and little known. Thus we are obliged to look critically at Polo’s descriptions of the anthropology, culture and religion of faraway, exotic places for traces of reductive preconceptions and bias.

My preliminary report after a relatively conscientious reading of this translation’s text and foot-notes with occasional glances at the original text in old French reveals that the worst charge made against Polo—that he is shot through with ethnocentricity to the point of distorting every ethically different human group he sees as racially inferior Otherness can be dismissed out of hand. There is little evidence of racism in general or of black-white racism specifically in Polo’s account, for example;  Polo even describes one Indian (in India) tribe positively that reversed black-white values in skin pigment, esthetics, and in good vs evil. On the world of “Saracens,” (Muslims) Polo is generally even handed. He doesn’t apparently slander Muslims or their religion.

A slightly less serious charge—that of not viewing any of the cultures and peoples he sees with any real accuracy—is also mainly untrue though Polo does make some stellar mistakes (the detailed notes in the back clear up these cases, so no worry of gaining serious misconceptions if you read the book carefully). Polo accepted hearsay as valid evidence; that is, he doesn’t always distinguish between what he saw personally and what he only heard. Though he had nothing like a modern map, his geography is amazingly accurate – ask Thubron who traveled the same routes.

The closest Polo comes to portraying other human beings as monstrous is in Zanzibar where his accounts of the Negroid people are clearly fantastic and grotesque. Stories about pygmies and Hottentots may account for this unpleasant portrayal of short & squat men and women. But to use this one episode, as does one recent literary “theorist” to condemn the whole work as worthless prejudice is little better than slander. (Travel Writing: Self and the World by Casey Blanton, Routledge, 1997)
As for the original language in which The Travels or Le Devisement du Monde was written, according to Philippe Menard, the editor of the fine little edition published by Droz, it appears to be Franco-italien. The edition referred to here is the Old French version which was apparently the most popular, sold the most copies and Made Polo famous.

Finally sorry about the 3-5 year delay in this review depending on how you look at it!

-JD