I bought this book in Adelaide. I haven’t made a note on my bookmark, but probably O’Connell’s in Bank Street. I popped in there with a couple of Discworld friends during a break from Nullus Anxietas 9 in 2024. I read this book a while ago, but needed a break before writing about it to figure out how I feel about it. It’s essentially the story of di Robilant’s search for the journey of two brothers, Nicolò and Antonio Zen, from Venice up the North Atlantic. In his travels he follows their map and their letters they had sent home. The Zen brothers travelled in the 1380s and 1390s, but their story wasn’t written about until 1558 when Antonio’s great-great-great-grandson wrote and published a book. In this book we are given the story of the author of the book, the publisher of the book, and also some history of the Zen brothers, as well as various histories of the areas they visited.
Things of note
We’re told about Iceland’s greatest poem. It was written in the fourteenth century by Eysteinn Ásgrímsson at Thikkvabaerklaustur. I look at the details about it and am astonished. I do wonder whether Shakespeare got the idea of some of his rhyme and metre from. Was it this poem? It was written about 200 years before Shakespeare. But, what would I know about the history of literature. The poem has one hundred stanzas. Each stanza has eight lines. And each line has eight syllables. I was thinking this would look beautiful on the page, but I can’t find anything on the web to illustrate this. What I did find was this sung rendition of verse 91 on Instagram. It is really beautiful.
I quite enjoyed the footnotes. One footnote talks about the mistranslation in the first English edition of the Zen book published in 1616. Which way the wind blows makes a difference to where the boat lands. The original Italian text tells us the wind was ‘blowing from the south-west’. The translation in 1616 tells us it was ‘blowing to the south-west’. A huge difference.
If you’re interested in globes and navigation you’ll have heard of Mercator. Born Gerhard Kramer near Antwerp in 1512, he Latinised his name to Gerardus Mercator after 1527. He is famous for translating the spherical globe into a map that is flat. It’s a lot easier to take a flat map travelling than a globe. He was struggling with the North Atlantic and some northern areas as he had no reliable data. Turning to the Zen Map he copied the outline of those areas onto his map, this gave legitimacy to the Zen Map. People have since found issues with the Zen Map, and this book by di Robilant talks about these issues and what he found when he tried to physically to these places.
Anyway
It’s an interesting book. I found myself fascinated by the history and the geography. It was certainly good to be taken through the areas where the Zen brothers travelled and to see how accurate the map was. I did enjoy the story of how he got his start with this story, and then we’re shown how he found the gentleman who started him off. Essentially, we’re taken on a full circle which, to my eyes, matches how a glob is round and when you start off in one place you can turn it in a complete 360° and come back to where you started. Some might argue a globe is a sphere, but it still works.