The "reworking"/"metaphrasis" is a rather faithful ‘rewording’ of Andreopoulos’ original translation. The two versions offer largely the same text, though the Reworking has one extra story that seems to be unique to it (Ingenia 3, or, The Fish in the Field), as it does not appear in Andreopoulos or any of the eastern text traditions of The Book of Sindbad. This story is embedded in the larger story Ingenia 1, or, The Trick: The Wiles of Women Collection, which is the second story told by the seventh master in all versions of the Syntipas tale. In Ingenia 1, a man believes he has recorded every possible current and historical instance of women's trickery and deceit. Upon learning about his project, a woman tricks him in a new an unexpected way, demonstrating that women's creative capacity for deception cannot be captured in a single text. As further proof of her cleverness and women's creativity, the woman also then narrates an additional story: she asks the tale-collector if he has heard the story of The Fish in the Field (Ingenia 3); when he replies that he has not, she then relates it as yet another example for his 'Wiles of Women' collection. Ingenia 3 is entered below as its own story, as the 20th story told; however, it should be understood as appearing within the frame of the previous narrative.
The Reworking version also changes the storyline of another one of the stories, Mel, to an ostensibly more plausible one. In Andreopoulos’ original version, escalating violence over s honeycomb begins with a bee that is attracted to the honey, killed by a merchant's cat, who is then killed by a hunter's dog. The author responsible for the Reworking omits the cat and introduces a woman from the merchant’s village, who claims the hunter stole the beehive from her village and tries to grab it. The dog then barks at the woman, the hunter and the merchant start to fight, and the inhabitants of the two villages join in and they all kill each other. In this version, the bee’s presence is pointless. Some of the post-Byzantine versions try to make sense of the role of the bee by making the woman say that the bee was from her village and recognised the stolen honey.
These and other minor differences can help to determine which unseen or understudied manuscripts belong to which tradition.
The post-Byzantine versions of the 16th and 17th centuries are based on this Reworked version, not on the original Andreopoulos text.
[Added by Marjolijne Janssen and Jane Bonsall]
General Information
Language & Composition
Recorded Branch of This Secondary Version
Pattern of Embedded Stories in This Version
Connected Manuscripts