Sorry I’ve been gone a long time. I got a new job and it’s taken up all my time.
I’ve been reading a lot, but I’m still working my way through The Annotated 1001 Nights at bedtime. Even though I’ve read several translations, including Burton’s (which I never did finish), I have to admit to learning a couple of things.
1.) Although every illustration I’ve seen of the Sinbad voyages depicts the giant that attacks him as a cyclops (including, of course, Ray Harryhausen’s movie The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad), in the original text the giant has two eyes. We owe the idea that the carnivorous giant is a Cyclops to the Western translators and illustrators. They obviously cribbed the idea from The Odyssey
This came as a total surprise to me. When I was very young and first learned about the apparent cyclops in Sinbad, I already knew about the one in the Odyssey, and figured out this was a case of cultural diffusion (although I didn’t think of it in those terms, of course). I suppose it was, but dating from a lot later than I thought, and not done by the parties I thought did the diffusing.
- This ought to have been obvious to me (the reason I’m putting it in this thread), but it hadn’t really hit me before that, despite how I’ve always thought of him, Sinbad isn’t really a sailor. He’s a merchant who’s only a passenger on the ships he sails on.
It’s almost certainly because he’s always depicted in films and cartoons as a sailor, and often explicitly called that – “Popeye the Sailor meets Sinbad the Sailor” from 1936. Guy Williams as “Captain Sinbad” from 1963. And Sinbad is addressed as “captain”, and acts as such in the Harryhausen films. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. was Sinbad as a captain in 1947’s “Sinbad the Sailor” (which, over a decade before The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, told of his Eighth voyage)
But in the original, Sinbad is never in command of the ship, so it’s not his fault when the ship crashes or people get left behind. But he always seems to come out of every voyage, despite his troubles, with a monetary profit.
Sinbad, in fact, reminds me very much of Jonathan Swift’s Lemuel Gulliver, who profits from his voyages and spends time at home with his family, until, as with Sinbad, restlessness and wanderlust overcome him and he goes off on another trading expedition, and has awful things happen to him again. In fact, Sinbad also reminds me of another protagonist from the early 18th century – Robinson Crusoe. If you haven’t read Daniel Defoe’s novel, you should know that he doesn’t only have one eventful voyage – the one that leaves him stranded, Selkirk-like, is only the last of several voyages Crusoe makes, each of them involving extraordinary events and danger. But, like Gulliver and Sinbad, even after traumatic voyages and some time spent in recuperation, the urge to wander strikes him again. “I was born to be my own destroyer,” says Crusoe of this tendency.
Crusoe was written in 1719 and Gulliver in 1726. Antoine Galland started the craze for the Arabian Nights with his translation into French between 1704 and 1717. Translations into English started appearing in 1706. So both Swift and Defoe would have known about the Sinbad stories and had access to them.
In fact, Swift shows more evidence of influence. He knew of and mentions the “Alcoran” (al Koran) in Gulliver. Burton, in his translation of the Nights, suggests that Swift’s name for the human savages in the land of the Houyhnhnms – “yahoos” – comes from Arabic ya hou – which he translates as “O man!”
