Odorico da Pordenone (–1331)

The oldest travel book about Indonesia (and China and Mongolia) I found is from Odoric of Friuli, an Italian Franciscan monk who dictated “Odoritus de Rebus Incognitus” around 1330 to a fellow monk after his 13-year journey. The book is translated in Dutch as “Mijn Reis naar het Verre Oosten” (2008) [transl.: My Journey to the Far East]. In less than 60 pages Oderic travels through the Middle East, India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Vietnam and further to China, but unfortunately, his most used phrase is that “there are many very strange things happening here, but this is not the place to tell about them”, or similar cut-offs. Where he does describe detail, it is often about religious matters. Aceh commands one page, a place where according to Odoric everybody walks naked and does it with everybody, and children are being sold to be eaten. Yet, Aceh commands more space than Java. Disappointing travel account, only of interest because it is almost 700 years old.… (meer)

Pathetic. It's clear from the forward that this volume aims to support the canonization of Odoric and that scholarship or, for that matter, thought matters much less (see in particular the introduction's embarrassing description of the Mongol invasion). The intro treats his travels as real, trying, as so many folks have done before, to map his travels onto the actually existing world (suspend, please, your theoretical objections: you know what I mean). The translation is, once more, the Henry Yule translation, now 150 years old or so, even though better editions* of this very popular work (translations from Latin into Italian 7 times, French twice, and German) have appeared since the middle of the 19th century. Why Franciscans couldn't get someone to do a new translation from the Latin, I don't know.

Nonetheless, this is essential reading for anyone writing on what may be the most famous adaptation, namely, the Travels of John Mandeville. Read this here or, better yet, read the Yule trans for free via here.

* this volume claims the current standard edition is A. Van den Wyngaert, Sinica Franciscana I (Florence-Quarecchi, 1929), 413-95… (meer)