Catching the Prester John Bug

John Mullan

• Baudolino by Umberto Eco, translated by William Weaver
  Secker, 522 pp, £18.00, October 2002, ISBN 0 436 27603 8

Somewhere in the skirts of the fabled land of Prester John, late in the 12th century, Baudolino, the protagonist of Umberto Eco’s latest novel, encounters a pygmy. He discovers that ‘the greeting to exchange with him was Lumus kelmin pesso desmar lon emposo, which means that you pledged not to make war against him and his people.’ Baudolino’s quickness with tongues is what has allowed him to prosper, or at least to survive. He has assured his companions that ‘unknown languages would create no problems, because when he had spoken with barbarians for a little while, he learned to speak as they did.’