What shall we do with the drunken Railer?

For whatever reason, that ridiculous passage in Ulysses with its interminable list of chaps whose names and titles rhyme with Sinbad the Sailor -- the one I expanded on in my May 25 post "With?" -- has been on my mind these days. After posting "Yeats, Joan, and Claire" yesterday, I even looked up the French translation to confirm my assumption that the French version of Darkinbad the Brightdayler (Dark = d'Arc) would include clair. It does. The rest of the translation is pretty uninspired. Instead of finding lots of real words that rhyme with sailor, as Joyce does, the French just sticks the first letters from the English onto Sinbad le Marin, yielding Tinbad le Tarin, Whinbad le Wharin, etc. -- pure nonsense, lacking the charm of the tailors and whalers of the original. Only two (not counting the already anomalous Darkinbad) deviate from this schema. Minbad the Mailer becomes le Malin ("the wicked" or "the clever"), and Rinbad the Railer becomes le Rabbin ("the rabbi") -- which I think has retroactively made my own verse about Rinbad (who travels by train because he's cheap) antisemitic!

Due to that context -- Rinbad, sailors, French, translation -- a small book on one of my shelves caught my eye this morning: an English translation of The Drunken Boat by Arthur Rimbaud. I didn't have time to look at it, but I made a mental note to add it to my reading list.

Later, in the afternoon, I had to stop into a shop to buy something and was amazed to hear the background music they were playing: some kind of pop version of the sea shanty "Drunken Sailor." I couldn't make out most of the lyrics, not even enough to tell for sure what language they were in, but the tune was unmodified, and each verse still ended with the singers belting out "Ur-lie in the mor-ning!"

This obviously suggests a new way of adapting the Ulysses passage:

What shall we do with the shrunken sailor?

What shall we do with the trunken tailor?

What shall we do with the drunken jailer?

Ur-lie in the mor-ning!

What shall we do with the whunken whaler?

What shall we do with the nunken nailer?

What shall we do with the funken failer?

Ur-lie in the mor-ning!

and so on until you run out of consonants. It could be the next "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall."