Repository path: workshop/regimes/R43-prose-holds.md · rendered 2026-09-09

R43 — the prose holds: rhymed prose stays prose, and the log records what that cost

v0.1, pilot. R41 graded rhymed prose, R42 graded rhymed verse. A narrative باب of the Gulistan is both, alternating inside a paragraph, and it offers a translator a third move neither regime has vocabulary for: when the Persian rhymes in prose, lift the passage into English verse, where a rhyme is conventional, expected, and costs nothing to justify. Four published hands of this work take that move or refuse it, and ARM-persian-hands counts which.

R43 exists so that the lead's own rendering is not a fifth policy but an instrument. It answers a different question from the published hands: at how many of Sa'di's prose rhymes is an English prose chime reachable at all, by a hand that is required to try and forbidden to escape into verse.

The rule

1. Prose stays prose; verse stays verse. The English FORM at every block is the copy-text's FORM. Moving a prose block into verse is forbidden — this is the rule the regime is named for and it is not a claim that the move is wrong. It is forbidden here because a hand permitted to escape into verse cannot measure whether prose would have yielded.
2. Render the sense. No fact, event, referent or evaluation added; nothing dropped. This clause outranks 3, 4 and 5, exactly as in R41 and R42. A chime bought with a word the Persian has not got is a refusal, not a chime.
3. At every frozen prose saj' locus, attempt a chime, and enumerate before choosing. Write the ordinary English renderings of each rhyme-bearing member the hand would accept on the sense alone, then look for a pair among them. The enumeration is written into the log whether or not it yields.
4. Grade every prose locus with one of four verdicts: - TAKEN — a chiming pair was reachable within rule 2 and was used. - AVAILABLE-REFUSED — a chiming pair was reachable and was not used, with the pair quoted and the ground given (normally rule 2). - UNAVAILABLE — the enumeration yielded no pair the tool grades above NONE. - VERSE-WOULD-SOLVE — an additional flag, not an alternative to the three above, set at any locus where moving the passage into verse would plainly have supplied the chime. This flag is the regime's whole point of contact with the study limb: it marks the places where the published hands' escape route was open and the lead was forbidden to take it.
5. Grade every bayt exactly as R42 rule 5 — FULL / SLANT / NONE, assigned by tools/rhyme_pairs.py after the hand has written its own reading down, both standing where they differ. R42 rules 1 and 4 (the unit is the bayt; do not attempt the source's run length) carry over unchanged.
6. The hand does not revise a rendering to move a grade. Grades are read off the rendering the sense produced; the rendering is not tuned to the grade.
7. Freeze before evaluation. The log is frozen and committed before any published hand is opened beyond the priming declared on the loci page, and before any evaluation is designed.

What R43 is not

It is not a recommendation that rhymed prose should be rendered as prose. Whether the genre change is a good move is precisely what ARM-persian-hands has no evidence about yet, and a regime cannot settle it by fiat. Rule 1 is an instrument constraint, declared as such: it holds one variable still so that the other can be read.