Messer Marco Polo

Donn Byrne was a storyteller, the last, as he himself explained, of a long line of Irish storytellers. He belonged to the school of the romantic, the rhetorical, the magical—in short to the stylists of storytelling. Here is the convincing and unscholarly tale of Marco Polo’s courtship of Golden Bells, the daughter of Kubla Khan, and of his journey from Venice, “Bride of the East,” to the courts of Cathay, seen through the eyes and told in the brogue of the old Ulster Scotch-Irishman, Malach...