Repository path: workshop/regimes/R57-leaf-contract.md · rendered 2026-09-09

R57 — Walter Leaf's printed contract, instantiated by another hand

v0.1, pilot. R50 was the project's first instantiation of a printed prescription a translator published and did not himself fully carry out (Preston 1850 on Arabic rhymed prose). R57 is the second, and the first on verse form: Walter Leaf's 1898 contract for carrying the Persian ghazal into English, taken from his Introduction and his own table of metres, and signed by a hand that is not Leaf's.

The point of instantiating a printed contract is that it is not the lead's design. The clauses were written by a translator with his own reasons, published, and left on the record; what they cost is a fact about them and not about this project's taste.

The rule

1. R51 §1 carries over unchanged and outranks everything below: render the sense, adding no fact, referent or evaluation and dropping none; enumerate the options before choosing and write the enumeration down; grade mechanically after the hand has written its own reading; never revise a rendering to move a grade; verse stays verse; freeze the log before any evaluation is designed and before any published hand's page is opened.
2. L-METRE. Every line of the ode is in one measure, and the measure is the one Leaf's own table assigns to that ode — not one chosen by the translator. Quantity is rendered by stress, in Leaf's words: "stressed syllables are regarded as long, unstressed generally as short", with his licence that an unstressed syllable of full vowel or heavy consonantal matter may stand for a long. The syllable count of the Persian measure is exact; the two shorts Leaf prints with an overline may contract to one long, and that is the only permitted variation.
3. L-RHYME. The Persian monorhyme, at every rhyming position of the ghazal: both hemistichs of bayt 1 and the second hemistich of every later bayt.
4. L-RADIF. Where the source carries a radif, the English carries one too: a fixed word sequence closing every rhyming position, rendering the Persian radif, with the rhyme falling immediately before it. Under R57 this is mandatory, not optional (E-20260830-leaf-contract design v2, critic finding C2-8): Leaf's own clause is hedged — "Several instances of this have been reproduced" — and a hedged clause cannot be tested by a hand free to invoke the hedge.
5. Bayt for bayt. One English couplet per Persian bayt; nothing added, nothing merged.
6. The two arms differ in exactly one clause. LEAF = clauses 2–5. FREE = clauses 3–5 with clause 2 released: line length free, the same rhyme family kept so that the rhyme inventory is not a second difference.
7. The instrument is the enumeration, not a score. For every bayt the log records, before any comparison: what the arm had to drop, what it had to add, and what the alternative was. The comparison between arms is the difference in those enumerations, made in public, per bayt. No number from either arm is a quality claim; the lead never judges its own translation.

What R57 is not

It is not an attempt to write better English than Leaf, and no comparison with his page is made on quality. It is an attempt to find out what his contract costs the hand that signs it, on a poem he chose, in a metre he named.