Repository path: workshop/regimes/R52-play-first.md · rendered 2026-09-09

R52 — the play first: a translator's own printed promise, taken as an instruction

v0.1, pilot. R48 made the object two translators of al-Ḥarīrī printed a refusal about. R52 does the mirror thing: it takes a translator's printed promise and treats it as a working rule.

Edward B. Eastwick, closing his translator's preface to the Gulistan, Haileybury College, 1 October 1852: "I have uniformly done my best to preserve the play upon words which occurs so often, and which is accounted such a beauty in the East."

That sentence is the whole of this regime's brief. R52 exists so that Eastwick's own page can be read against a page made by someone actually doing what it says — which is the only way to know whether uniformly is a description or a courtesy.

The rule

1. Prose stays prose; verse stays verse — R43 rule 1, carried over: the copy-text's own typography decides, so that the comparison with the published hands is of what is in the English and not of how it is set. Verse is not rhymed for the sake of rhyme. This regime's object is the play upon words; an end-rhyme the regime went looking for would confound the measurement of it, and a reader asked to find a play may well quote a rhyme. A rhyme that falls out of the ordinary rendering for nothing is kept and logged.
2. Render the sense. This clause outranks 3 and 4. No fact, event, referent or evaluation added; nothing dropped. A pun bought with a word the source has not got is a refusal, not a pun. Verbatim from R43 rule 2 and R48 rule 2, and for the same reason: it is what keeps a R52 rendering comparable with a hand that was not trying.
3. At every frozen تجنیس locus, deliver an English play upon words if rule 2 permits one. The hand is released from the ordinary-word constraint: it may take a less usual but still exact word, invert a clause, change the part of speech, or lengthen or shorten a member. What it may not do is change what the sentence says.
4. The English play need not be the same kind of play as the Persian. Sa'di's تجنیس is overwhelmingly a one-consonant substitution in a shared skeleton, a thing Persian and Arabic do easily and English does rarely. English answers a play with alliteration, with polyptoton, with a homonym, with a rhyme inside the clause, with a word used twice in two senses. Any of these counts, provided a reader who knows no Persian would call it a play upon words. This is the clause that makes the regime executable at all, and it is also the clause that makes R52's count a ceiling rather than a like-for-like.
5. No play is manufactured where the source has none. The regime chases the author's plays; it does not scatter its own. This is not fastidiousness: the same span supplies the experiment's control blocks, and a hand that puts a pun into a plain sentence destroys its own control.
6. The play is delivered at the locus. Where the play lands somewhere else in the same block because rule 2 forbade it at the locus, the locus is graded DISPLACED and both places are logged.
7. Every locus is graded and every refusal is quoted: TAKEN / DISPLACED / AVAILABLE-REFUSED / UNAVAILABLE, with the ground given, exactly as R43 rule 4.
8. No published English of the span may be opened before the log is frozen.
9. Freeze before evaluation.

What R52 is not

It is not a recommendation, and it is emphatically not a claim that Eastwick's sentence is good advice. Whether a reader is better served by a translator who chases every play is precisely what there is no evidence about. R52 is one arm of an experiment and a ceiling measurement: what a hand reaches when it tries at every locus, so that a hand that promised to try can be read against it.