7AN and Nadan (was 7AN: The Adventures of Hajji Baba)

stoneox17 at aol.com · 24 Oct 2010, 19:46 · from 2010-October.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: stoneox17 at aol.com (stoneox17 at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2010 15:46:03 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: (urth) 7AN and Nadan (was 7AN: The Adventures of Hajji Baba)
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTi=cBU7SDugw48mNs_mYjg-uCYY39wBN4x+5a9f- at mail.gmail.com>
References: <AANLkTi=cBU7SDugw48mNs_mYjg-uCYY39wBN4x+5a9f- at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <8CD41CB3A07DDEA-B2C-1B974 at webmail-m099.sysops.aol.com>

Dave Tallman <davetallman at msn.com> writes:

>James Morier's Hajji Baba of Ispahan, The Adventures of Hajji Baba is a
>famous book that may be a source Wolfe drew on for ideas and character
>names in "Seven American Nights". This book was written in the 1800's
>and details the picaresque adventures of Hajji Baba, a barber. It 
features
>characters named the Mollah Nadan, Mirza Amak, and Osman Aga. Credit
>for this find goes to JazzCat, a poster on 
http;//usefulphrases.yuku.com
>(It's interesting that in this work the name Nadan is given to a 
religious leader,
>a mullah).

>According to Robert Borski's posting on urth.net:

>   While seeming a plausible Arab name, "Nadan," in fact, is something 
you
>   would be ill-mannered in calling anyone. In Farsi it means "stupid, 
idiot;"
>   therefore, by extension, the same thing that 'cretin' does.

>With the discovery of "The Adventures of Hajji Baba" that claim about
>Nadan's name is partially invalidated. In translation, "Hadjji Baba" 
is a
>well-known work of Persian literature, and any name drawn from it 
would
>be a reasonable name for a child. In the printed text of the English 
version
>of the book (available online through Google books), the name shows
>up as "Molah Nad&acirc;n". According to 
http://www.khamush.com/persian/rubaie236.htm, >"Nad&acirc;n-&aacute;m" 
means "I cannot."

>I'm becoming convinced that Wolfe read this book as part of his 
background
>research for the story and picked that name deliberately. Molah Nadan
>changes clothing with the narrator and ends up being punished for a 
crime
>in his place. A Christ figure, perhaps?

Googling a while ago, I came across another instance of the name Nadan.
It comes from the story of Nadan and Ahikar (or Ahiqar), which is a 
story
from the Middle East from Biblical times, and which Wolfe also may have
been familiar with.

The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia summarizes it as follows:

"Ahikar ... adopts as heir his nephew Nadan. The unappreciative youth
falsely accuses his benefactor of treason, whereupon Ahikar escapes
death only through the intervention of an executioner whom he himself
had once spared,"

Eventually Ahikar is restored to his position, and Nadan is punished.

Peter S

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net