Repository path: workshop/translations/alf-layla/R05-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

«ألف ليلة وليلة» — The Thousand Nights and a Night, span A, R05 v1

Source. Anonymous, «ألف ليلة وليلة», the frame tale «حكايات الملك شهريار وأخيه الملك شاه زمان». Copy-text and its collation: ../collation.md. Stored source: ../source-hindawi-2022-spanA.txt, Hindawi Foundation 2022 vol. 1 pp. 11–12, 642 Arabic words.

Regime. R05 serial long-work translation (source-only, cumulative, append-only). Binding register: ../register.md.

Translated by the lead agent as a labelled subject, in session, at $0 — not ledgered (charter §3, A4). No API call produced any part of this. The lead does not judge it.

Contamination: high. Basis, stated before any measurement: the Nights is among the most frequently translated and most frequently quoted works in any language, and its English tradition (Galland-via-anonymous 1706, Lane 1839, Payne 1882, Burton 1885, and a century of retellings) is certainly in the lead's training data. Two specific priming events are declared rather than assumed: (i) before translating, while establishing that Project Gutenberg holds Burton, the lead ran grep over Burton vol. 1 and saw his night-closing formula — "And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased to say her permitted say" — which does not occur in span A but is a sample of his diction; (ii) the phrase "To hear is to obey" for بالسمع والطاعة was written from English tradition, not derived at the desk. No published rendering of span A itself was read before this page and its log were frozen. The measured overlap against Lane and Burton is reported in RS-20260814-saj-carriage-alf-layla §5 and was computed after the freeze.

Lineage. First span of the project's fifth long work and its first Arabic text. No predecessor version.

Evaluation pointers. None yet. This artifact is not a jury arm: with contamination: high it is a craft record and a yardstick, never an independent third translation (CLAUDE.md, standing rule).

Span A

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.

Praise be to God, the Lord of all living, and blessing and peace upon the chief of the messengers, our lord and master Muhammad, and upon his house — blessing and peace everlasting, unceasing, till the Day of Reckoning. And so: the lives of those going before have become a lesson to those coming after, that a man may look on the lessons that fell to others and take instruction, and may read the report of the nations that are past and what befell them and take correction. Glory, then, to Him who made the report of those going before a lesson to a people coming after. And among those lessons are the tales that are called the Thousand Nights and a Night, and what is in them of marvels and parables.

The Tales of King Shahriyar and his Brother King Shah Zaman

It is related — and God is more knowing, more discerning, more prevailing, more giving — that in days of old and in ages long since told there was a king among the kings of the house of Sasan, in the islands of India and China, master of troops and of auxiliaries, of servants and of household. He had two sons, the one older and the other younger, and the two of them were horsemen and champions, and the older was the better horseman of the two. He held the land, and he dealt justice to God's servants with his own hand, and the people of his country and his kingdom loved him; and his name was King Shahriyar. And his younger brother's name was King Shah Zaman, and he was king of Samarkand of the Persians. And the affair went on straight in their two countries, each of them in his own kingdom a just ruler over his subjects, for the space of twenty years, and they in the greatest ease and gladness of heart.

They did not leave off in that state until the elder king longed for his younger brother, and ordered his vizier to travel to him and bring him back. And he answered him: To hear is to obey. And he travelled until he arrived in safety, and came in to the brother, and delivered the greeting, and told him that his brother longed for him and intended that he should visit him. And he answered him: To hear is to obey. And he made ready for the journey, and brought out his tents and his camels and his mules and his servants and his men, and set his own vizier over his country as governor, and went out making for his brother's country.

Then, when it was the middle of the night, he remembered a thing he had forgotten in his palace, and turned back and went into his palace, and found his wife lying in his bed with her arms round one of the black slaves. And when he saw this the world went black in his face, and he said within himself: If this has come about when I have not even left the city, what will this whore be at when I am away with my brother a while? Then he drew his sword and struck the two of them and killed them in the bed, and went back that same hour and minute, and gave the order to march, and travelled until he came to his brother's city.

And his brother was glad at his coming, and went out to him and met him and greeted him and rejoiced in him with the greatest joy, and had the city decked out for him, and sat with him, talking cheerfully. And King Shah Zaman remembered what had happened in the business of his wife, and there came upon him a surpassing grief, and his colour turned yellow and his body grew weak. And when his brother saw him in that state, he supposed within himself that it was on account of his having parted from his country and his kingdom, so he let him alone and did not ask about it.

Then one day he said to him: Brother, I see that your body has grown weak and your colour has turned yellow. And he said to him: Brother, there is a wound within me. And he did not tell him what he had seen of his wife. So he said: I want you to travel out with me to the hunt and the chase; it may be that your breast will open. But he refused it, and his brother travelled out to the hunt alone.

Now in the king's palace there were windows looking over his brother's garden. And he looked out, and there was the palace door opened, and out of it came twenty slave-girls and twenty slaves, and his brother's wife walking among them, and she at the height of beauty and loveliness, until they came to a fountain-basin, and took off their clothes, and sat down with one another. And there was the king's wife saying: Masud! And a black slave came to her and embraced her and she embraced him, and he lay with her; and the rest of the slaves did the same with the girls; and they did not leave off kissing and embracing and fucking and the like until the day was going.

And when the king's brother saw that, he said within himself: By God, my affliction is lighter than this affliction. And what he had of rage and of grief was made light in him, and he said: This is greater than what happened to me. And he did not leave off eating and drinking.

And after this his brother came back from his journey, and they greeted one another; and King Shahriyar looked at his brother King Shah Zaman and saw that his colour had been given back to him and his face had reddened, and that he had taken to eating with an appetite after having eaten little; and he wondered at that, and said: Brother, I used to see you yellow in colour and in face, and now your colour has been given back to you. Tell me how you are.

And he said to him: As for the change of my colour, I will tell you of that; but excuse me from telling you of the giving back of my colour.

And he said to him: Tell me first of the change of your colour and of your weakness, that I may hear it.

And he said to him: Brother, know that when you sent your vizier to me summoning me to come before you, I made myself ready, and I had gone out from my city; then I remembered the bead that I had meant for you, in my palace, and I turned back, and found my wife with a black slave, and he asleep in my bed, and I killed the two of them, and came to you with my mind on this business. This is the cause of the change of my colour and of my weakness. But as for the giving back of my colour — excuse me from telling you of it.

[Span A ends at the foot of printed p. 12. Span B begins «فلما سمع أخوه كلامه».]

Extent. 642 Arabic words → 1,201 English words (span A body, excluding headings), a ratio of 1.87 — high, and mostly a fact about the languages rather than about this rendering: Arabic writes prepositions, conjunctions and possessive pronouns as clitics on the following or preceding word, so a word count of an Arabic text is not commensurable with a word count of an English one.

Span B

When his brother heard his words he said to him: I adjure you by God to tell me the cause of the giving back of your colour. And he repeated to him everything he had seen. And Shahriyar said to his brother Shah Zaman: My wish is to see it with my own eye. And his brother Shah Zaman said to him: Make out that you are travelling to the hunt and the chase, and hide yourself with me, and you will look on it and make sure of it by sight.

So the king called out that same hour for the journey, and the troops and the tents went out to the outskirts of the city, and the king went out, and then he sat in the tents and said to his serving-boys: Let no one come in to me. Then he disguised himself and went out in hiding to the palace his brother was in, and sat in the window that looks over the garden an hour of time; and there were the slave-girls and their mistress coming in with the slaves, and they did as his brother had said, and they went on like that until the afternoon.

And when King Shahriyar saw that business his mind flew from his head, and he said to his brother Shah Zaman: Get up, let us travel off on our own way, and we have no need of kingship until we see whether the like of this has befallen anyone else or not; and then our death is better than our life. And he agreed to that.

Then the two of them went out by a secret door in the palace, and they did not leave off travelling days and nights until they came to a tree in the middle of a meadow, and by it a spring of water beside the salt sea. And they drank from that spring and sat down to rest. And when an hour of the day had passed, there was the sea heaving, and there came up out of it a black column rising to the sky and making for that meadow.

He said: And when the two of them saw that they were afraid, and climbed to the top of the tree, and it was tall, and they set to watching what would happen. And there was a jinni tall of stature, broad of skull, wide of chest and of stature, with a box on his head. And he came up onto the land, and came to the tree the two of them were on top of, and sat down under it, and opened the box, and brought a case out of it, and then opened the case, and there came out of it a girl, shining and splendid, as though she were a shining sun, as the poet has said:

She shone in the dark, and the daylight was shown, and the trees were lit with a light of her own. From her brightness the suns take their rising, when she comes into view, and the moons are made known. All created things bow down between her hands when she appears and the veils are overthrown. And when the lightnings of her sanctuary flash, the rain that comes down is tears alone.

He said: And when the jinni looked at her he said: Lady of the free women, whom I snatched away on her wedding night, I want to sleep a little. Then the jinni put his head on her knee and slept. And the girl raised her head to the top of the tree, and saw the two kings up in that tree; and she raised the jinni's head off her knee and set it on the ground, and stood under the tree, and said to them by signs: Come down, and do not be afraid of this ifrit. And they said to her: For God's sake, let us off this business. And she said to them: For God's sake, the two of you are to come down, or I will wake the ifrit on you and he will kill you the foulest of killings. And they were afraid, and came down to her; and she stood up for them and said: Ram me a hard ramming, or I will wake the ifrit on you.

And out of their fear King Shahriyar said to his brother King Shah Zaman: Brother, do what she has ordered you. And he said: I will not do it until you do it before me. And the two of them began winking at one another about fucking her. And she said to them: Why is it I see the two of you winking? If you do not come forward and do it — if not, I will wake the ifrit on you. And out of their fear of the jinni they did what she had ordered them. And when they had finished she said to them: Come to yourselves.

And she brought out for them a purse from her pocket, and brought out of it for them a necklace with five hundred and seventy rings on it, and said to them: Do you know what these are? And they said to her: We do not know. And she said to them: The owners of these rings, all of them, used to do it with me unbeknown to the horn of this ifrit. So give me your two rings, you the two others. And the two of them gave her two rings from their hands.

And she said to them: This ifrit snatched me away on my wedding night, and then he put me in a case, and put the case inside the box, and threw seven locks on the box, and set me at the bottom of the roaring sea where the waves go warring. And he did not know that a woman of us, when she wants a thing, nothing overcomes her — as one of them has said:

Never feel safe with women, and never trust the promises of them. Their being pleased and their being angry hangs between the legs of them. They show a love that is a lie, and treachery is the stuffing of the clothes of them. Take your warning from the story of Joseph, and be on your guard against the guile of them. Do you not see that Iblis drove Adam out on account of them.

And one of them has said:

Give over blaming: tomorrow it strengthens the one you blame, and longing only adds to the love a greater flame. If I am a lover, I do nothing but what men before me did, the very same. The wonder should rather be at the man who out of the temptation of women safely came.

[Span B ends at the foot of the maiden's speech, printed p. 15. Span C begins «فلما سمعَا منها هذا الكلام».]

Extent, span B. 582 Arabic words → 1,138 English words, a ratio of 1.96 against span A's 1.87. Split by form: prose 490 → 938, ratio 1.91; verse 92 → 200, ratio 2.17 over 12 bayts in three poems, set as 24 English lines. The verse expands more than the prose, not less — the expectation at the desk was the opposite, on the reasoning that Arabic verse is grammatically compressed and would resist. What actually costs the words is the rhyme: every line was written twice, once for sense and once to reach the rhyme-word, and the second pass adds syllables (D15). The stored source is ../source-hindawi-2022-spanB.txt, page-marked [[p13]], [[p14]], [[p15]].

Span C

Hindawi 2022 vol. 1, pp. 15 (foot)–18, 1,036 Arabic words (1,022 prose, 14 verse). Stored source: ../source-hindawi-2022-spanC.txt. This span completes the frame tale; the first night begins on p. 19 under its own heading.

And when the two of them heard this talk from her they marvelled the utmost marvelling, and said to one another: If this is an ifrit, and there has befallen him greater than what has befallen us, then this is a thing to console us. Then they turned away from her that same hour, and went back to the city of King Shahriyar, and went into his palace; and then he struck off the neck of his wife, and likewise the necks of the slave-girls and the slaves.

And King Shahriyar took to taking a virgin girl, and doing away with her virginity, and killing her that same night; and he did not leave off doing so for the space of three years, and the people cried out, and fled away with their daughters, and there was not left in that city a girl who could bear intercourse. Then the king ordered the vizier to bring him a girl as his custom ran, and the vizier went out and searched and found no girl, and made for his house, angry and beaten down, in fear for himself from the king.

And the vizier had two daughters: the elder was named Shahrazad and the younger Dunyazad. And the elder had read the books and the histories and the lives of the kings who went before and the reports of the nations that are past; it is said that she had gathered a thousand books of the books of history bearing on the peoples of old and the kings that are gone and the poets. And she said to her father: What is it with me that I see you altered, carrying care and sorrows? And someone has said, in this sense, in verse:

Say to him who carries sorrow: sorrow is not made to stay. As delight is spent and passes, so do sorrows pass away.

And when the vizier heard this talk from his daughter he told her what had happened to him with the king from the first of it to the last. And she said to him: By God, father, marry me to this king; and either I live, or I am a ransom for the daughters of the Muslims and a cause of their deliverance from between his hands. And he said to her: By God upon you, do not ever put yourself in danger. And she said to him: There is no help for it. And he said: I fear for you that there befall you what befell the ass and the ox with the owner of the crop. And she said to him: And what was it that happened to them, father?

He said: Know, my daughter, that a certain merchant had monies and cattle, and he had a wife and children; and God Most High had given him the knowledge of the tongues of the beasts and the birds; and that merchant's dwelling was in the country; and he had at his house an ass and an ox.

So one day the ox came to the ass's place and found it swept and sprinkled, and in his manger sifted barley and sifted straw, and the ass lying down at his rest; and at some times his master rode him for a need that came up, and he came back as he was.

And when it was one of the days, the merchant heard the ox saying to the ass: Much good may it do you. I am worn out and you are at your rest: you eat your barley sifted, and they wait on you; and at some times your master rides you and comes back, and I am for ever at the ploughing and the grinding.

And the ass said to him: When you go out to the field, and they lay the yoke on your neck, lie down and do not get up even if they beat you; and if you do get up, lie down a second time; and when they bring you back and set beans before you, do not eat them, as though you were weak; and hold off from eating and drinking a day, or two days, or three; then you will get rest from the toil and the strain.

And the merchant was hearing their talk. So when the driver came to the ox with his fodder he ate a little of it; and in the morning the driver went to take the ox to the ploughing and found him weak. And the merchant said to him: Take the ass and plough with him in his place the whole day. So the man went back and took the ass in the ox's place and ploughed with him the whole day; and when he came back at the end of the day the ox thanked him for his favours, in that he had rested him from the toil that day. And the ass gave him back no answer, and repented the hardest repenting.

And when it was the second day the ploughman came and took the ass and ploughed with him to the end of the day; and the ass did not come back until his neck was flayed and his weakness was extreme. And the ox looked him over and thanked him and glorified him. And the ass said to him: I was settled and at my rest, and nothing harmed me but my meddling. Then he said: Know that I am a well-wisher to you. I heard our master saying: If the ox does not get up from his place, give him to the butcher to slaughter him and make his hide into pieces. And I am afraid for you; and I have given you my counsel, and peace.

And when the ox heard the ass's talk he thanked him and said: Tomorrow I go out to pasture with them. Then the ox ate all his fodder to the end of it, until he licked the manger with his tongue. All of this, and their master hearing their talk.

And when the day came up the merchant and his wife went out to the cow-house and sat down; and the driver came and took the ox and went out. And when the ox saw his master he moved his tail and farted and pranced, and the merchant laughed until he fell over on his back. And his wife said to him: What are you laughing at? And he said to her: A thing I saw and heard, and I cannot let it out, or I die. And she said to him: There is no help but that you tell me it, and what the cause of your laughing was, even if you should die. And he said to her: I cannot let it out, for fear of death. And she said to him: You were laughing at nothing but me.

Then she did not leave off pressing him and pushing at him in talk until she had the better of him, and he was at a loss; and he fetched his children and sent for the fetching of the qadi and the witnesses, and he meant to make his will and then let out the secret to her and die; for he loved her a great loving, because she was his father's brother's daughter and the mother of his children; and he had lived of life a hundred and twenty years.

Then he fetched all her people and the people of his quarter and told them his tale, and that whenever he told anyone his secret he would die. And all the people who were there with her said to her: By God upon you, leave off this business, so that your husband, the father of your children, may not die. And she said to them: I will not go back from it until he tells me, even if he dies. So they fell silent about her.

Then the merchant got up from among them and made for the beast-house to wash for prayer, and then to come back and tell them and die. And he had a cock with fifty hens under him, and he had a dog. And the merchant heard the dog calling out to the cock and abusing him and saying to him: You are cheerful, and our master is off to die! And the cock said to the dog: And how is that business? And the dog repeated the story over to him.

And the cock said to him: By God, our master is short of sense. I have fifty wives — I please this one and I anger this one — and he has only the one wife, and he does not know the right handling of his business with her. What is the matter with him that he does not take her some mulberry rods, and then go into her room and beat her until she dies, or repents and does not go back to asking him about anything?

He said: And when the merchant heard the cock's talk as he addressed the dog, he came back to his senses and resolved on beating her.

Then the vizier said to his daughter Shahrazad: Perhaps he will do to you as the merchant did to his wife. And she said to him: What did he do? He said: He went in to her in the room after he had cut himself mulberry rods and hidden them inside the room, and said to her: Come inside the room so that I may tell you, and no one look at me, and then I die. And she went in with him; and then he locked the door of the room upon the two of them, and came down on her with the beating until she fainted away, and she said to him: I repent. And then she kissed his hands and his feet and repented, and she went out, she and he; and the company and her people were glad, and they sat in the happiest of conditions until death.

And when the vizier's daughter heard her father's speech she said to him: There is no help for it. So he fitted her out and went up to King Shahriyar. And she had given charge to her young sister and had said to her: When I go to the king I will send to ask for you; and when you come to me and you see that the king has had his need of me, say: Sister, tell me a strange tale that we may cut the night-waking short with it. And I shall tell you a tale in which is the deliverance, if God wills.

Then her father the vizier took her up to the king; and when he saw him he was glad, and said: Have you brought me what I need? And he said: Yes.

And when he wanted to go in to her she wept, and he said to her: What is with you? And she said: O king, I have a young sister, and I want to say goodbye to her. So the king sent for her, and she came to her sister and embraced her and sat down under the bed. Then the king got up and took her virginity; and then they sat talking.

And her young sister said to her: By God upon you, sister, tell us a tale that we may cut short the night-waking of our night with it. And she said: With love and honour, if this well-bred king gives me leave. And when he heard that talk — and there was a restlessness on him — he was glad at the hearing of a tale.

Span D

Hindawi 2022 vol. 1, pp. 19–22, 762 Arabic words → 1,466 English, four paragraphs to four. Stored source: ../source-hindawi-2022-spanD.txt. The first night whole — its heading, the opening of the first embedded tale, the night-closing formula, and the frame's return to the palace. Night 2 opens on p. 23 under its own heading.

When It Was the First Night

The Tale of the Merchant and the Ifrit

She said: It has come to me, O fortunate King, that there was a merchant among the merchants, a man of much money and much business in the lands, and one day he rode out and went to press his claims in one of the lands, and the heat came hard upon him, and he sat down under a tree and put his hand into his saddlebag and ate a crust of bread he had by him, and a date. And when he had done eating the date he threw the stone away, and there was an ifrit, tall of stature, with a sword in his hand, and he came close to that merchant and said to him: Get up, that I may kill you as you killed my son. And the merchant said to him: How did I kill your son? He said to him: When you ate the date and threw its stone away, the stone came into my son's breast, and it was finished with him and he died that same hour. And the merchant said to the ifrit: Know, ifrit, that there is a debt upon me, and I have much money and children and a wife, and I hold pledges; so let me go to my house and give every claimant his claim, and then I will come back to you, and you have my covenant and my bond upon it that I will come back to you; then do with me what you want, and God is surety for what I say. And the jinni took his bond of him and let him go, and he went back to his town and settled all his affairs and delivered the claims to the people they belonged to, and told his wife and his children what had happened to him, and they wept, and so did all his people and his women and his children; and he made his will, and stayed by them till the year was out; and then he set off, and took his shroud under his arm, and said goodbye to his people and his neighbours and all his household, and went out in spite of his own nose; and they set up over him a crying and a shrieking. And he walked until he came to that garden, and that day was the first day of the new year. And while he sat weeping over what was coming to him, there was a great old man coming towards him with a gazelle on a chain, and he gave this merchant peace and greeted him, and said to him: What is the reason for your sitting in this place, and you on your own, and it a lodging of the jinn? And the merchant told him what had happened to him with that ifrit, and the reason for his sitting in this place. And the old man, the owner of the gazelle, marvelled and said: By God, brother, your debt is no debt but a mighty debt, and your tale is a marvellous tale, and were it written with needles on the inner corners of the eyes it would be a lesson to whoever would be lessoned.

Then he sat down at his side and said: By God, brother, I shall not stir from you until I see what happens to you with that ifrit. Then he sat by him talking with him, and that merchant fainted away, and there came upon him fear and terror, and sorrow that was sore and thought that was more; and the owner of the gazelle at his side. And there was a second old man coming towards the two of them with two saluki bitches of the black dogs; and when he had given them peace he asked the two of them the reason for their sitting in this place, it being a lodging of the jinn, and they told him the story from its first to its last. And he had not settled in his seat before a third old man came towards them with a dapple mule, and gave them peace and asked them the reason for their sitting in this place, and they told him the story from its first to its last, and in the telling again there is nothing to gain. And there a dust rose up, and a great whirlwind came on from the middle of that waste; and the dust drew off, and there was that jinni with a drawn sword in his hand and his eyes throwing sparks. And he came at them and pulled that merchant out from among them and said to him: Get up, that I may kill you as you killed my son, the life of my liver. And that merchant sobbed and wept, and the three old men gave out weeping and wailing and lamentation.

Then the first old man, who was the owner of the gazelle, roused himself out from among them and kissed the hand of that ifrit and said to him: Jinni, and crown of the kings of the jinn, if I tell you my tale with this gazelle and you find it marvellous, will you make me a gift of a third of this merchant's blood? He said: Yes, old man; if you tell me the tale and I find it marvellous, I make you a gift of a third of his blood. And that first old man said: Know, ifrit, that this gazelle is my father's brother's daughter, and of my flesh and my blood; and I married her when she was little in years, and I lived with her about thirty years and was not granted a child by her. So I took myself a concubine, and was granted by her a male child like the full moon when it shows full, come out with two handsome eyes and two arched brows and limbs complete; and he grew little by little until he was a boy of fifteen years. And a travelling came up for me to one of the cities, and I travelled with a great stock of goods. Now my father's brother's daughter, this gazelle, had learned magic and divination from her childhood, and she enchanted that boy into a calf, and she enchanted the slave-girl his mother into a cow, and handed the two of them over to the herdsman. Then I came back after a long while of travelling, and asked after my son and after his mother, and she said to me: Your slave-girl is dead, and your son has run off and I do not know where he went. So I sat a year's while, grieving in heart and weeping in eye, until the Feast of the Sacrifice came; and I sent to the herdsman to set aside a fat cow for me, and he brought me a fat cow, and she was my concubine, whom that gazelle had enchanted. So I tucked up my clothes and took the knife in my hand and made ready to slaughter her, and she cried out and wept a bitter weeping. So I left off from her and ordered that herdsman to slaughter her and flay her; and he slaughtered her and flayed her and found in her neither fat nor flesh, but skin and bone. And I repented of slaughtering her where repentance was no use to me, and I gave her to the herdsman and said to him: Bring me a fat calf. And he brought me my enchanted son as a calf; and when that calf saw me it broke its rope and came to me and rolled itself on me and howled and wept. And pity took me for him, and I said to the herdsman: Bring me a cow, and leave this one.

And the morning broke upon Shahrazad, and she broke off the talk that was allowed. And her sister said to her: How pleasing your telling is, and how gracious, and how delicious, and how sweet! And she said to her: And where is this beside what I shall tell you the coming night, if I live and the King spares me!

And the King said within himself: By God, I shall not kill her until I have heard the rest of her telling. Then the two of them passed that night till morning in each other's arms; and the King went out to the place of his judging, and the vizier came up with the shroud under his arm; and the King judged and invested and dismissed until the end of the day, and did not tell the vizier anything of it; and the vizier marvelled the utmost marvelling. Then the court broke up, and King Shahriyar went into his palace.

Span E

Hindawi 2022 vol. 1, pp. 23–28, 1,485 Arabic words → 2,801 English, eight paragraphs. Stored source: ../source-hindawi-2022-spanE.txt. The Tale of the Merchant and the Ifrit complete — the second and third old men's tales, the copy-text's second and third nights, and the tale's dismissal. The span ends where the copy-text puts its heading for the next tale, the fisherman and the ifrit. p. 26 is blank in the copy-text (verified on the page image; it is not a transcription gap), and the night divisions of this stretch are irregular in a way D56 treats as the span's governing decision.

When It Was the Second Night

Dunyazad said to her sister Shahrazad: Sister, finish your telling for us, the telling of the merchant and the jinni. She said: With love and honour, if the King gives me leave for it. And the King said to her: Tell. And she said: It has come to me, O fortunate King, of right reckoning, that when he saw the calf weeping his heart yearned to it, and he said to the herdsman: Leave this calf among the beasts. All this, and the jinni marvelling at the telling of that marvellous talk. Then the owner of the gazelle said: My lord of the kings of the jinn, all this happened while my father's brother's daughter, this gazelle, was looking on and seeing, and saying: Slaughter this calf, for he is fat. And it did not come easy to me to slaughter him, and I ordered the herdsman to take him, and he took him and went off with him. And on the second day, as I was sitting, there was the herdsman coming towards me, and he said: My lord, I have a thing to say that will gladden you, and the good-news gift is mine. And I said: Yes. And he said: Merchant, I have a daughter who had learned magic in her childhood from an old woman who was with us; and when we were together yesterday and you gave me the calf, I brought him in to her, and my daughter looked at him and covered her face and wept, and then she laughed and said: Father, has my worth fallen so low with you that you bring strange men in upon me? And I said to her: And where are the strange men? And why did you weep and why did you laugh? And she said to me: This calf that is with you is the son of my lord the merchant, but he is enchanted, and his father's wife enchanted him and his mother; and this is the reason for my laughing. And as for the reason for my weeping, it is on account of his mother, whom his father slaughtered. And I marvelled at that the utmost marvelling, and I could not credit the coming up of the morning before I came to you to tell you. And when I heard, jinni, the words of this herdsman, I went out with him, drunk without wine from the greatness of the joy and gladness that had come to me, until I came to his house. And the herdsman's daughter welcomed me and kissed my hand, and then the calf came to me and rolled itself on me. And I said to the herdsman's daughter: Is what you say about that calf true? And she said: Yes, my lord; he is your son and the life of your liver. And I said to her: Girl, if you set him free, you shall have from me all the cattle and the moneys that are under your father's hand. And she smiled and said: My lord, I have no desire for the money except on two conditions: the first, that you marry me to him; and the second, that I enchant the woman who enchanted him, and shut her up — otherwise I am not safe from her cunning.

And when I heard, jinni, the words of the herdsman's daughter, I said: And you shall have besides that all the moneys under your father's hand, over and above; and as for my father's brother's daughter, her blood is allowed you. And when she heard my words she took a bowl and filled it with water, and then she spoke a spell over it and sprinkled the calf with it, and said to him: If God created you a calf, stay in this shape and do not change; and if you are enchanted, go back to your first shape, by the leave of God Most High. And there he was shaking himself, and then he became a human being; and I fell upon him and said to him: By God, tell me everything my father's brother's daughter did to you and to your mother. And he told me everything that had happened to the two of them, and I said: My son, God has appointed you one who has set you free and set your right free. Then I married him to the herdsman's daughter, jinni; and then she enchanted my father's brother's daughter, this gazelle; and I came here and saw this company and asked them about their case, and they told me what had happened to this merchant, and I sat down to see what would be. And this is my telling.

And the jinni said: This is a marvellous telling, and I make you a gift of a third of his blood. Thereupon the second old man came forward, the owner of the two saluki bitches, and said to him: Know, lord of the kings of the jinn, that these two bitches are my brothers, and I am the third of them. Our father died and left us three thousand dinars, and I opened a shop where I sold and bought, and my brother travelled with his trade and was away from us a year's while with the caravans, and then he came and had nothing with him. And I said to him: Brother, did I not advise you against travelling? And he wept and said: Brother, God — mighty and glorious — decreed this upon me, and there is no use left in this talk, and I own nothing. So I took him and brought him up to the shop, and then I took him to the bath and clothed him in a suit of splendid clothes, and I ate with him, and said to him: Brother, I reckon the profit of my shop from year to year, and then I divide it, apart from the capital, between me and you. Then I made the reckoning of the shop from the profit of my money and found it two thousand dinars; and I praised God — mighty and glorious — and rejoiced the utmost rejoicing, and divided the profit between me and him in two halves. And we stayed together some days, and then my two brothers asked for travel again, and wanted me to travel with them, and I would not agree, and I said to the two of them: What did the two of you gain in your travelling, that I should gain? And they pressed me and I did not obey them; rather we stayed in our shops selling and buying a full year, and the two of them kept putting travel before me until six full years had gone by. Then I agreed with them on travelling and said to them: My brothers, let us reckon what money we have. And we reckoned it, and there it was six thousand dinars. And I said: Let us bury half of it under the ground, so that it may profit us if some matter befalls us, and let each one of us take a thousand dinars and trade with it. The two of them said: An excellent opinion. So I took the money and divided it in two halves, and buried three thousand dinars; and as for the other three thousand dinars, I gave each one of us a thousand dinars, and we fitted out goods and hired a ship and carried our things into it, and we travelled a full month's while until we entered a city; and we sold our goods and gained ten dinars on the dinar. Then we wanted to travel, and we found on the seashore a slave-girl with torn rags on her, and she kissed my hands and said: My lord, is there good and kindness in you, that I may repay you for them? I said: Yes, there is good and kindness in me, and though you do not repay me. And she said: My lord, marry me and take me to your country, for I have made you a gift of myself; so do me a kindness, for I am of those with whom kindness and good are done and who repays them. And do not let my condition deceive you.

And when I heard her words my heart yearned to her, for something God — mighty and glorious — wanted; and I took her and clothed her, and spread her a fine spreading in the ship, and turned to her and honoured her. Then we travelled, and my heart had come to love her a great loving, and I took to not parting from her night or day, and I was taken up with her away from my two brothers. And the two of them were jealous of me and envied me my money and the plenty of my goods, and their eyes reached out at the money entire, and they talked of killing me and taking my money, and they said: Let us kill our brother and all the money becomes ours. And Satan made their deeds fair to them. And they came to me while I was asleep beside my wife, and carried me and my wife and threw the two of us into the sea. And when my wife woke she shook herself and became an ifritah, and carried me and brought me up onto an island, and was gone from me a little, and came back to me at morning, and said to me: I am your wife who carried you and saved you from being killed, by the leave of God Most High. And know that I am a jinniyah; I saw you and my heart loved you for God's sake, and I am a believer in God and in His messenger — God bless him and give him peace. And I came to you in the condition you saw me in, and you married me; and here I am, I have saved you from drowning. And I am angry at your two brothers, and there is nothing for it but that I kill them. And when I heard her tale I marvelled, and thanked her for what she had done, and said to her: As for the destroying of my two brothers, that ought not to be. Then I told her what had happened to me with the two of them from the first of the time to its last. And when she heard my words she said: This night I shall fly to them and drown their ships and destroy them. And I said to her: By God, do not do it; for the master of the proverb says: You who do good to him who did ill, what he did is enough for the ill-doer. And they are my brothers in any case. She said: There is nothing for it but to kill them. And I begged her tenderness.

Then she carried me and flew and set me down on the roof of my house; and I opened the doors and brought out what I had hidden under the ground, and opened my shop after I had given the people peace, and bought goods. And when it was night I went into my house and found these two dogs tied up in it; and when they saw me they rose to me and wept and clung to me. And I knew nothing until my wife said: These two are your brothers. And I said: Who did this deed to them? She said: I sent to my sister and she did that to them, and they will not be set free until after ten years. And I have come, and I am on my way to her, that she may set them free after their staying ten years in this condition. And I saw this young man, and he told me what had happened to him, and I wanted not to stir until I saw what happens between you and him. And this is my story. The jinni said: It is a marvellous tale, and I make you a gift of a third of his blood for his crime.

When It Was the Third Night

She said: It has come to me that the third old man, the owner of the mule, said to the jinni: I shall tell you a tale more marvellous than the tale of the two, and you will make me a gift of what is left of his blood and his crime, jinni. He said: Yes. And the old man said: O Sultan and chieftain of the jinn, this mule was my wife. I travelled and was away from her a full year, and then I finished my travelling and came to her in the night, and I saw a black slave lying with her in the bed, and the two of them in talk and coquetry and laughter and kissing and tussling. And when she saw me she made haste and rose to me with a jug with water in it, and she spoke over it and sprinkled me, and said: Come out of this shape into the shape of a dog. And I became on the instant a dog, and she drove me out of the house; and I went out of the door and did not leave off walking until I came to a butcher's shop, and I went forward and took to eating of the bones. And when the owner of the shop saw me he took me and brought me into his house; and when the butcher's daughter saw me she covered her face from me and said: Do you bring us a man and bring him in upon us? And her father said: Where is the man? She said: This dog — his wife enchanted him, and I am able to set him free. And when her father heard her words he said: By God, daughter, set him free. And she took a jug with water in it and spoke over it and sprinkled a little of it on me, and said: Come out of this shape into your first shape. And I came back to my first shape, and I kissed her hand and said to her: I want you to enchant my wife as she enchanted me. And she gave me a little of the water and said: When you see her sleeping, sprinkle this water on her, and she will become as you are asking. And I found her sleeping and sprinkled the water on her and said: Come out of this shape into the shape of a mule. And she became on the instant a mule, and she is this one you are looking at with your own eye, O Sultan and chieftain of the kings of the jinn. Then he turned to her and said: Is it true? And she shook her head and said by signs: Yes, this is true. And when he had done with his telling the jinni shook with delight, and made him a gift of a third of his blood.

And the morning broke upon Shahrazad, and she broke off the talk that was allowed. And her sister said to her: Sister, how honeyed your telling is, and how pleasing, and how delicious, and how sweet! And she said: And where is this beside what I shall tell you the coming night, if I live and the King spares me! And the King said: By God, I shall not kill her until I have heard the rest of her telling, for it is marvellous. Then the two of them passed that night in each other's arms till morning; and the King went out to the place of his judging, and the vizier and the troops came in to him, and the court was knit up; and the King judged and invested and dismissed, and forbade and commanded, until the end of the day. Then the court broke up, and King Shahriyar went into his palace. And when night came on and he had done his need of the vizier's daughter, her sister Dunyazad said to her: Sister, finish your telling for us.

And she said: With love and honour. It has come to me, O fortunate King, that when the third old man told the jinni a tale more marvellous than the two tales, the jinni marvelled the utmost marvelling and shook with delight, and said: I make you a gift of what is left of his crime, and I set him free for you. And the merchant turned to the old men and thanked them, and they wished him joy of his safety, and each one went back to his own country.

Span F

Hindawi 2022 vol. 1, pp. 28–33, 1,009 Arabic words → 1,911 English. Stored source: ../source-hindawi-2022-spanF.txt. The copy-text's third night complete — the Tale of the Fisherman and the Ifrit from its heading to the fisherman's stratagem — and the seam into the fourth night, which the span crosses and stops at, because the seam is what this span was taken for. The prose continues under span E's When It Was the Third Night: the copy-text prints no heading here, and V15 supplies none. p. 30 is a full-page colour plate with a caption and five lines of text below it — that is why Wikisource has never transcribed it — and the five lines were read from the page image and are recorded in ../collation.md §9.

The Tale of the Fisherman and the Ifrit

And this is no more marvellous than the tale of the fisherman. And the King said to her: And what is the tale of the fisherman? She said: It has come to me, O fortunate King, that there was a man, a fisherman, and he was well on in years, and he had a wife and three children, and he was poor of condition; and it was his custom to cast his net four times a day and no more. Then he went out one of the days at the hour of noon to the shore of the sea, and set down his basket and threw his net, and waited until it settled in the water, and then gathered its cords and found it heavy; and he pulled at it and could not do it, so he took the end of it to the land and drove in a stake and tied it to that. Then he stripped and dived into the water round the net, and did not leave off working at it until he had brought it up; and he rejoiced and put on his clothes and came to the net, and found in it a dead donkey. And when he saw that he grieved, and said: There is no might and no power save in God the High, the Great. Then he said: This is a marvellous provision. And he recited, saying:

O you who wade in the dark of the night and your undoing, cut short your toil: provision is not in the pursuing.

Then the fisherman, when he saw the dead donkey, freed it from the net and wrung the net out; and when he had done with the wringing he spread it, and after that he went down into the sea and said: In the name of God. And he threw it in and waited over it until it settled, and then pulled it, and it was heavy and had set fast, more than the first time; and he thought it was fish, so he tied the net and stripped and went down and dived, and then worked at it until he had freed it and brought it up on the land, and found in it a great water-jar, and it was full of sand and mud. And when he saw that he was sorry, and recited the poet's saying:

O burning of Time, let me be — and if you will not let me be, then deal gently with me. For nothing at all is given me by my luck, nor by the craft of my hand. I went out to seek my provision; I found my provision had died on me. How many an ignorant man stands out in the open, and a learned man hides where nobody can see.

Then he threw the water-jar away, and wrung his net and cleaned it, and asked God's forgiveness, and went back to the sea a third time, and threw the net and waited over it until it settled, and pulled it, and found in it potsherds and glass bottles. And he recited the poet's saying:

This is provision: you have no loosing of it and no knot, and no pen avails you, and no jot.

Then he lifted his head to the sky and said: O God, You know that I do not cast my net more than four times, and I have cast three. Then he named the name of God and threw the net into the sea, and waited until it settled, and pulled it, and could not manage the pulling of it; and there it was, caught fast in the ground. And he said: There is no might and no power save in God. And he stripped and dived down to it, and set to working at it until it came up on the land; and he opened it and found in it a flask of yellow brass, and it was full, and its mouth stopped with lead, and on the lead the impress of the seal-ring of our lord Solomon. And when the fisherman saw it he rejoiced, and said: This I shall sell in the brass-market; it is worth ten dinars of gold. Then he shook it and found it heavy, and said: I must open it and look at what is in it, and store that away in my saddlebag, and then sell the flask in the brass-market. Then he brought out a knife and worked at the lead until he had loosed it from the flask, and set the flask on the ground and shook it for what was in it to spill out; and nothing came down out of it, but there came out of that flask a smoke that rose to the vault of the sky and walked on the face of the earth. And he marvelled the utmost marvelling. And after that the smoke came to its full and gathered, and then shuddered and became an ifrit, his head among the clouds and his feet among the clods: with a head like a dome, and hands like winnowing-forks, and legs like the masts of ships, and a mouth like a cave, and teeth like stones, and nostrils like an ewer, and eyes like two lamps — matted and grimed. And when the fisherman saw that ifrit his sinews shook, and his teeth locked together, and his spittle dried away, and he was blind to his way. And when the ifrit saw him he said: There is no god but God; Solomon is the prophet of God. Then the ifrit said: Prophet of God, do not kill me; I shall never again cross a word of yours or disobey an order of yours.

And the fisherman said to him: Marid, do you say Solomon is the prophet of God, and Solomon has been dead a thousand and eight hundred years, and we are at the end of time? What is your story, and what is your telling, and what is the cause of your going into this flask?

And when the marid heard the fisherman's words he said: There is no god but God. Good news for you, fisherman. And the fisherman said: What good news do you bring me? And he said: That I kill you this very hour, the foulest of all killings. The fisherman said: For that good news, warden of the ifrits, you deserve to have God's covering taken off you, you doomed thing. Why would you kill me, and what makes my killing due, when I set you free from the flask, and delivered you from the bed of the sea, and brought you up to the land? And the ifrit said: Wish upon me — what death will you die, and what killing will you be killed? And the fisherman said: What is my crime, that this should be my payment from you? The ifrit said: Hear my tale, fisherman. The fisherman said: Say it, and be short in the saying; my soul has come down to my feet.

He said: Know that I am of the renegade jinn, and I disobeyed Solomon son of David, I and Sakhr of the jinn; and he sent to me his vizier Asaf son of Barakhya, and he brought me by force and led me to him abased, with my nose in the dust, and stood me between his hands. And when Solomon saw me he took refuge from me, and offered me faith and to come in under his obedience, and I refused; so he called for this flask and shut me up in it, and sealed me over with the lead and stamped it with the Greatest Name, and ordered the jinn, and they carried me and cast me into the middle of the sea. And I stayed a hundred years, and I said in my heart: Whoever sets me free, I shall make him rich for ever. And a hundred years went by and nobody set me free. And another hundred came in on me, and I said: Whoever sets me free, I shall open him the treasures of the earth. And nobody set me free. And another four hundred years went by over me, and I said: Whoever sets me free, I shall do him three needs. And nobody set me free. And I was angry a mighty anger, and I said within myself: Whoever sets me free in this hour, I shall kill him, and let him wish how he dies. And here you are: you have set me free, and I let you wish how you die.

And when the fisherman heard the ifrit's words he said: God, the marvel of it — and I came to set you free in these days of all days! Then the fisherman said to the ifrit: Excuse me from killing me, and God will excuse you; and do not destroy me, or God will set over you one who will destroy you. And the marid said: You must be killed. So wish upon me a death you will die. And when the fisherman was certain of it he came back at the ifrit and said: Excuse me, in honour of my having set you free. And the ifrit said: And I am killing you for nothing but that you set me free. And the fisherman said to him: Elder of the ifrits, do I do you a fair thing and you meet me with a foul one? But the proverb did not lie where it said:

We did what was fair; they met it with the opposite of it, and this, on my life, is the work of the insincere. And whoever does a kindness to those who are not fit for it is paid as they paid the man who sheltered Umm Amir.

And when the ifrit heard his words he said to him: Do not hope; you must die. And the fisherman said: This is a jinni and I am a human, and God has given me a complete mind; and here I am contriving a thing for his destruction by my trick and my mind, and he is contriving by his guile and his malice. Then he said to the ifrit: Have you settled on killing me? He said: Yes. And he said to him: By the Greatest Name engraved on Solomon's seal-ring, I ask you about a thing, and you tell me the truth of it. He said: Yes. Then the ifrit, when he heard the mention of the Greatest Name, was troubled and shaken, and said to him: Ask, and be short. And he said to him: How were you in this flask, when the flask does not hold your hand or your foot? How does it hold the whole of you? And the ifrit said to him: And do you not believe that I was in it? And the fisherman said: I shall never believe it until I see you in it with my own eye.

And the morning broke upon Shahrazad, and she broke off the talk that was allowed.

When It Was the Fourth Night

She said: It has come to me, O fortunate King, that the fisherman, when he said to the ifrit: I shall never believe you until I see you with my own eye in the flask —

Span G

Hindawi 2022 vol. 1, pp. 33–36, 1,356 Arabic words including one poem of five abyāt → 2,594 English. Stored source: ../source-hindawi-2022-spanG.txt. The copy-text's fourth night complete — the fisherman turns the ifrit's own sentence back on him, and tells the Tale of King Yunan and the Sage Ruyan as far as the envious vizier's first move. This is the first tale in the work told by a character to save his own life, so it is the first place the frame's own logic is restated inside the story. The span begins where span F stopped: the night-4 heading and its resumption sentence were rendered there and are not repeated here. The night ends mid-sentence — the copy-text prints ذكر والله أعلم … and breaks off — and V15 carries the break as printed.

— the ifrit shook himself and became smoke rising to the sky, and then it gathered and went into the flask little by little until the smoke was complete inside the flask. And there was the fisherman, quick: he took the sealed lead stopper and stopped the mouth of the flask with it, and called out to the ifrit and said to him: Wish upon me — what death will you die? I shall throw you into this sea, and build myself a house here, and everyone who comes here I shall keep from fishing, and I shall say to him: There is an ifrit here, and everyone who brings him up, he shows him the kinds of death and gives him his choice among them.

And when the ifrit heard the fisherman's words he wanted to come out and could not, and saw himself shut in, and saw upon him the stamp of Solomon's seal-ring, and knew that the fisherman had jailed him in the jail of the meanest of the ifrits, and the filthiest, and the smallest. Then the fisherman went with the flask towards the sea, and the ifrit said to him: No, no. And the fisherman said: You must, you must. So the marid made his talk gentle and humbled himself, and said: What do you want to do with me, fisherman? He said: I shall throw you into the sea. If you stayed in it a thousand years and eight hundred, I shall make you stay until the Hour rises. Did I not say to you: Spare me and God will spare you, and do not kill me or God will kill you — and you refused my word, and you wanted nothing but to betray me; and God threw you into my hand, and I have betrayed you. And the ifrit said: Open for me, that I may do you good. And the fisherman said to him: You lie, accursed one. My case and your case is the case of King Yunan's vizier and the sage Ruyan. And the ifrit said: And what is the affair of King Yunan's vizier and the sage Ruyan, and what is their story?

And the fisherman said: Know, ifrit, that in the old of time and the passing of the age, in the city of the Persians and the land of Ruman, there was a king called King Yunan, and he was possessed of wealth and troops and force and helpers of all the kinds. And there was in his body a leprosy that the physicians and the sages had failed at, and no drinking of medicines availed him, and no powder and no ointment, and not one of the physicians could treat him.

And there had come into King Yunan's city a great sage, well on in years, called the sage Ruyan; and he knew the Greek books and the Persian and the Roman and the Arabic and the Syriac, and the science of medicine and of the stars, and he knew the roots of their wisdom and the rules of their business, what is of benefit in them and what is of harm; and he knew the properties of plants and grasses and the herbs that hurt and the herbs that help. He had learned the science of the philosophers, and had taken in all the sciences of medicine and others besides. Then the sage, when he had come into the city and stayed in it a few days, heard the report of the King and what had happened to him in his body, of the leprosy God had tried him with, and that the physicians and the people of the sciences had failed at treating it. And when that reached the sage he passed the night busy with it; and when the morning shone, and its light came on, and the sun gave greeting to the ornament of the fair, he put on the finest of his clothes and came in to King Yunan and kissed the ground and prayed for him for the lasting of his glory and his bounties, and spoke to him with the best that was in him, and made himself known to him. And he said: O King, it has come to me what has come upon you of this thing in your body, and that many of the physicians have not known the trick of getting rid of it; and here I am, I shall treat you, O King, and I shall not make you drink a medicine and I shall not rub you with an ointment.

And when King Yunan heard his words he marvelled, and said to him: How will you do it? By God, if you make me well I shall make you rich, you and the child of your child, and give you my bounty, and everything you wish for is yours, and you shall be my boon-companion and my beloved. Then he bestowed a robe of honour on him and did him good, and said to him: Will you make me well of this sickness with no medicine and no ointment? He said: Yes, I shall make you well with no hardship to your body. And the King marvelled the utmost marvelling, and then said to him: Sage, this that you have told me of — at what hour will it be, and on what day? Be quick with it, my son. He said to him: To hear is to obey.

Then he went down from the King and rented a house for himself, and put in it his books and his medicines and his drugs. Then he brought out the medicines and the drugs and made of them a mallet and hollowed it, and made a shaft for it, and made a ball for it by his knowledge. And when he had made the whole of it and finished with it, he went up to the King on the second day and came in to him and kissed the ground between his hands, and ordered him to ride out to the field, and to play with the ball and the mallet.

And with him were the emirs and the chamberlains and the viziers and the lords of the state. And he had hardly settled into his sitting in the field when the sage Ruyan came in to him and handed him the mallet and said to him: Take this mallet, and close on it with a grip like this grip, and walk in the field, and strike the ball with it with your strength until your palm sweats and your body; and the medicine will go out of your palm and run in the rest of your body. And when you have sweated and the medicine has worked in you, go back to your palace, and after that go into the bath and wash and sleep; and you are made well, and peace. So then King Yunan took that mallet from the sage and held it in his hand and mounted the horse, and the ball was thrown between his hands, and he drove after it until he caught it, and struck it with strength, and his palm was closed on the shaft of the mallet; and he did not leave off striking the ball with it until his palm sweated, and the rest of his body, and the medicine ran into him from the grip.

And the sage Ruyan knew that the medicine had run in his body, and ordered him to go back to his palace and to go into the bath that same hour. So King Yunan went back at once and ordered that the bath be emptied for him, and they emptied it for him; and the bed-servants hurried and the slaves raced, and they made the King's cloth ready. And he went into the bath and washed a good washing, and put on his clothes inside the bath, and then came out of it and rode to his palace and slept there.

This is what happened in the matter of King Yunan. And as for what happened in the matter of the sage Ruyan, he went back to his house and passed the night; and when the morning came he went up to the King and asked leave of him, and he gave him leave to come in. And he came in and kissed the ground between his hands, and addressed the King with these lines:

Eloquence took its glory when your name as father was plain, and if one day it calls another father, it calls in vain. O owner of the face whose shining lights are such that of the hateful blow no darkness can remain. Your face has never ceased to shine and to be glad, so that we never see the face of Time in disdain. You have given me out of your bounty such favours as did with us what clouds do with the hills, in rain; and you have spent the most of your wealth in the seeking of heights, until you got from Time the ends you meant to gain.

And when he had finished with his verses the King rose up standing on his two feet, and embraced him and seated him at his side, and bestowed the high robes of honour on him. And when the King had come out of the bath he had looked at his body and found nothing in it of the leprosy, and his body had become clean like white silver; and he rejoiced at that the utmost rejoicing, and his breast grew wide and was opened.

And when the morning came he went into the court and sat on the bed of his kingship, and the chamberlains and the great ones of the state came in to him, and the sage Ruyan came in to him. And when he saw him he rose to him in haste and seated him at his side; and there were the tables of food spread, and he ate in his company, and he did not leave off with him, keeping him company, the whole of his day. And when the night came on he gave the sage two thousand dinars apart from the robes of honour and the gifts, and mounted him on his horse; and he went off to his house, and King Yunan marvelling at what he had made and saying: This man treated me from the outside of my body, and did not rub me with an ointment! By God, this is nothing but a reaching wisdom, and I owe this man favour and honour, and to take him for a companion to sit with and a companion to be easy with, for the length of time.

And King Yunan passed the night glad and rejoicing in the soundness of his body and his deliverance from his sickness. And when the morning came the King went out and sat on his chair, and the lords of his state stood between his hands, and the emirs and the viziers sat on his right and his left; and then he called for the sage Ruyan, and he came in to him and kissed the ground between his hands. And the King rose for him and seated him at his side, and ate with him and greeted him, and bestowed a robe on him and gave to him; and he did not leave off talking with him until the night came on. Then he assigned him five robes of honour and a thousand dinars, and the sage went off to his house thanking the King.

And when the morning came the King went out to the court, and the emirs and the viziers and the chamberlains were ringed about him. And he had a vizier among his viziers, foul of face, unlucky of star, base, mean, envious, kneaded upon envy and hatred. And when that vizier saw that the King had brought the sage Ruyan near and given him this bounty, he envied him for it and hid evil for him, as has been said to the point: No body is empty of envy. And it has been said to the point: Wrongdoing lies in ambush in the soul; strength shows it and weakness hides it.

Then the vizier came forward to King Yunan and kissed the ground between his hands and said to him: O King of the age and the time, you are the one whose good has covered the people; and I have with me a great counsel for you, and if I hide it from you I am a son of adultery. If you order me to show it, I shall show it to you. And the King said — and the vizier's talk had disturbed him: And what is your counsel? And he said: O mighty King, the ancients have said: He who does not look to the ends, Time is none of his friends. And I have seen the King in the wrong, in that he has given his bounty to his enemy, and to one who seeks the going of his kingship; and he has done him good and honoured him the utmost honouring, and brought him near the utmost nearness; and I fear for the King from that.

And the King was disturbed and his colour changed, and he said to him: Who is this you claim is my enemy and I do him good? And he said to him: O King, if you are asleep, wake up. I am pointing at the sage Ruyan. And the King said to him: This man is my friend, and he is the dearest of the people to me, because he treated me with a thing I gripped in my hand and made me well of my sickness, which the physicians had failed at; and there is not the like of him to be found in this age in the world, west or east. How is it that you say this saying about him? And from this day I appoint him salaries and allowances, and I make him a thousand dinars every month; and if I shared my kingship with him it would be little for him. And I do not think you say that except out of envy, as it has come to me about King Sindbad. Then King Yunan said: It is related — and God is more knowing …

And the morning broke upon Shahrazad, and she broke off the talk that was allowed. And her sister said to her: How pleasing your telling is, and how gracious, and how delicious, and how sweet! And she said to her: And where is this beside what I shall tell you the coming night, if I live and the King spares me!

And the King said within himself: By God, I shall not kill her until I have heard the rest of her telling, for it is a marvellous telling. Then the two of them passed that night in each other's arms till morning. And the King went out to the place of his judging, and the court was knit up; and he judged and invested and dismissed, and ordered and forbade, until the end of the day. Then the court broke up, and the King went into his palace; and the night came on, and he had his need of Shahrazad the vizier's daughter.

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Hindawi 2022 vol. 1, pp. 37–42, 1,769 Arabic words including eight poems of twenty-one abyāt → 3,479 English. Stored source: ../source-hindawi-2022-spanH.txt. The copy-text's fifth night whole — King Yunan tells his vizier the Tale of King Sindbad and the Falcon, the vizier tells King Yunan the tale of the vizier who contrived against a king's son, the sage Ruyan asks to be spared and is not, and the poisoned book kills the King. This is the first place in the work where a tale stands inside a tale inside a tale, and the copy-text marks none of it: one heading in six pages, and that heading is a night's, not a tale's.

When It Was the Fifth Night

She said: It has come to me, O fortunate King, that King Yunan said to his vizier: Vizier, envy has entered into you on account of this sage, and you want me to kill him, and after that I shall be sorry as King Sindbad was sorry over the killing of the falcon. And the vizier said: And how was that?

And the King said: It is related that there was a king of the kings of the Persians who loved the outing and the excursion and the hunt and the chase, and he had a falcon that he had reared and did not part from by night or by day; and all the night long he passed the night with it carried on his hand, and when he went up to the hunt he took it with him, and he had made for it a bowl of gold hung at its neck, and gave it to drink from that. And while the King was sitting, there was the officer over the birds of the chase saying: King of the age, this is the time of going out to the hunt. So the King made ready to go out, and took the falcon on his hand, and they went until they came to a valley, and they set up the net of the chase; and there was a gazelle that fell into that net. And the King said: Everyone the gazelle gets past on his side, I kill him.

So they narrowed the ring of the chase upon her, and there was the gazelle coming up to the King, and she reared upon her two legs and set her hands upon her breast as though she were kissing the ground to the King; and the King bowed his head to the gazelle, and she fled from over his head and went off into the open. And the King turned to the troops and saw them winking at one another about him, and he said: Vizier, what are the soldiers saying? And he said: They are saying that you said, Everyone the gazelle gets past on his side is to be killed. And the King said: By the life of my head, I will follow her until I bring her back.

Then the King went up on the gazelle's track, and did not leave off after her; and the falcon began to strike at her eyes until it blinded her and made her giddy, and the King drew a mace and struck her and toppled her, and got down and cut her throat and flayed her and hung her at the saddle-bow. And it was an hour of heat, and the place was a waste in which no water was found, and the King thirsted and the horse thirsted; and the King turned and saw a tree with water coming down from it like clarified butter, and the King was wearing a leather on his hand, and he took the bowl from the falcon's neck and filled it from that water and set the water in front of it — and there was the falcon striking the bowl and toppling it. So the King took the bowl a second time and filled it, and thought the falcon thirsty, and set it in front of it, and it struck it a second time and toppled it. And the King was angry at the falcon, and took the bowl a third time and offered it to the horse, and the falcon toppled it with its wing.

And the King said: God disappoint you, most ill-omened of birds — you have kept me from the drink, and kept yourself from it, and kept the horse from it. Then he struck the falcon with the sword and threw down its wings; and the falcon began to hold its head up and to say by signing: Look at what is above the tree. So the King raised his eye and saw above the tree a snake, and what was running was her poison; and the King was sorry for the clipping of the falcon's wings. Then he got up and rode his horse and went on, and the gazelle with him, until he came to his first place, and he threw the gazelle to the cook and said to him: Take her and cook her. Then the King sat down on the chair, and the falcon on his hand; and the falcon gave a gasp and died. And the King cried out in grief: Alas for the killing of the falcon, seeing that it saved him from destruction! This is what there was of the story of King Sindbad.

And when the vizier heard King Yunan's words he said to him: O King great of estate, and what is it that I have done out of necessity, and you have seen evil in it? I do this with you only out of pity for you, and you will come to know that it is sound; and if you accept it from me you are saved, and if not you perish, as there perished a vizier who had contrived against the son of a king among the kings. That king had a son given to the hunt and the chase, and he had a vizier, and the King ordered that vizier to be with his son wherever he turned. And he went out one day among the days to the hunt and the chase, and his father's vizier went out with him, and they went on together and the two of them looked at a great wild beast; and the vizier said to the king's son: Yours is this beast — go after it. So the king's son made for it until he was gone from the eye, and the beast was gone from him into the wilderness, and the king's son was bewildered and did not know where he should go.

And there was a slave-girl at the head of the road, and she was weeping; and the king's son said to her: Who are you? She said: The daughter of a king among the kings of India. And I was in the wilderness and drowsiness overtook me, and I fell from off the beast, and I did not know myself, and I became cut off and bewildered.

And when the king's son heard her words his heart softened at her state, and he carried her on the back of his beast and set her behind him, and went on until he passed by an island; and the slave-girl said to him: My lord, I want to be rid of a need. So he set her down on the island; and then she was slow, and he found her long, and he went in behind her and she did not know of him — and there she was a ghoulah, and she was saying to her children: Children, I have brought you today a fat boy. And they said to her: Bring him to us, mother, that we may eat him into our bellies. And when the king's son heard their words he was certain of destruction, and his flanks shook, and he feared for himself and went back. And the ghoulah came out and saw him like one afraid and quaking, and he was trembling; and she said to him: What ails you, afraid? And he said to her: I have an enemy and I am afraid of him. And the ghoulah said: You say, I am a king's son. He said to her: Yes. She said to him: What is it with you, that you do not give your enemy something of money and please him with it? And he said to her: He is not pleased with money, and is not pleased with anything but the soul; and I am afraid of him, and I am a man wronged. And she said to him: If you are wronged as you claim, then seek help against him from God, for He will suffice you against his evil and against the evil of all that you fear. So the king's son raised his head to the sky and said: O You who answer the call of the distressed when he calls You, and who lift the harm — help me against my enemy and turn him away from me; You are able to what You will.

And when the ghoulah heard his prayer she turned away from him, and the king's son turned away to his father and told him the story of the vizier, and you, O King, whenever you trust this sage he will kill you the ugliest of killings; and if you have done him good and brought him near you, still he is contriving your destruction. Do you not see that he cured you of the sickness from the outside of the body with a thing you held in your hand? Then do not be safe from his destroying you with a thing you hold as well.

And King Yunan said: You have spoken truly. It may be as you have said, counselling vizier; perhaps this sage came as a spy in search of my destruction, and if he cured me with a thing I held in my hand, he is able to destroy me with a thing I smell. Then King Yunan said to his vizier: Vizier, how is it to be done with him? And the vizier said to him: Send to him at this hour and ask for him, and if he comes, strike his neck; so you will be spared his evil and be at rest from him, and betray him before he betrays you. And King Yunan said: You have spoken truly, vizier.

Then the King sent to the sage, and he came, and he was glad, and did not know what the Merciful had decreed for him — as one of them has said to the point:

O you who fear your time, be safe, and give over your affairs to Him who spread the land. What is decreed is a thing that will be, it is not rubbed out, and safety is yours from what He never planned.

And the sage recited, addressing the King, the poet's saying:

If ever a day finds me failing your due, and my thanks left unshown, then tell me: for whom did I make ready my verse and my prose of my own? You were open-handed to me before the asking, with bounties that came to me with no putting-off in you and no excuse known. What ails me, that I do not give your praise its right, and praise your high place among men and when I am alone? I shall thank the good turns you have laid upon me — my mouth goes light with them, though they weigh my back down.

And also to the point:

Turn away from your cares and be free, and give over your affairs to the decree. And be glad of a good that is quick in coming, by which you will forget all that used to be. For many a matter that angers you has in its outcomes a content, as you will see. God does the thing that He plea- ses; so do not be one to disagree.

And also to the point:

Give over your affairs to the Sage, the One who understands, and rest your heart from the whole world and its demands. And know that the matter is not as you would wish, but what God wills — and in His judging all stands.

And also to the point:

Do not be wretched; forget your cares, all of them, for cares carry off the mind of the wise. Contriving does not profit a helpless slave — so leave it off, and come safe into a bliss that never dies.

And when the sage Ruyan came in, the King said to him: Do you know why I have brought you here? And the sage said: None knows the unseen but God, exalted be He. And the King said to him: I have brought you here to kill you and to take your soul from you. And the sage Ruyan marvelled the utmost marvelling at that speech, and said: O King, why do you kill me? And what fault has come out from me? And the King said to him: It has been said to me that you are a spy, and that you have come to kill me; and here I am, killing you before you kill me. Then the King cried out to the swordsman and said to him: Strike the neck of this betrayer and rest us from his evil. And the sage said: Spare me and God will spare you, and do not kill me or God will kill you. Then he repeated the saying over to him, like what I said to you, ifrit — and you will not let me be, but want to kill me. And King Yunan said to the sage Ruyan: I am not safe unless I kill you; for you cured me with a thing I held in my hand, and I am not safe from your killing me with a thing I smell, or otherwise. And the sage said: O King, is this my wage from you — that you meet grace with disgrace? And the King said: There is no help but your killing, with no delay.

And when the sage made certain that the King was his killer, past all escape, he wept and grieved over the good he had done to one not fit for it — as has been said to the point:

Maymuna is naked of the marks of the mind, but her father, out of the wits themselves, was made. He never walked, one day, on the dry ground or in the mire but by a light that guided him, of slipping afraid.

And after that the swordsman came forward and bound his eyes and drew his sword and said: Give the word. And the sage was weeping and saying to the King: Spare me and God will spare you, and do not kill me or God will kill you. And he recited the poet's saying:

I gave counsel and did not thrive; they cheated, and they throve; and my counselling dropped me down in a house of shame. If I live I shall not counsel; and if I die, then cry my death to the men of counsel after me, and let every tongue do the same.

Then the sage said to the King: Is this my wage from you, that you requite me the requital of the crocodile? The King said: And what is the tale of the crocodile? And the sage said: It is not possible for me to tell it while I am in this state; by God upon you, spare me and God will spare you. Then the sage wept a hard weeping.

And some of the King's intimates rose and said: O King, grant me the blood of this sage; for we have not seen him do you a fault, and we have not seen anything from him but that he cured you of your sickness that wearied the physicians and the sages. And the King said to them: You do not know the reason for my killing this sage. It is that if I spare him I am a dead man past all escape; for one who cured me of the sickness that was on me with a thing I held in my hand can kill me with a thing I smell, and I am afraid that he will kill me and take a fee upon me — for it may be that he was a spy, and came for nothing but to kill me. So there is no help but his killing, and after that I am safe for myself. And the sage said: Spare me and God will spare you, and do not kill me or God will kill you.

And when the sage made certain — ifrit — that the King was his killer past all escape, he said to him: O King, if there is no help but my killing, then give me time to go down to my house and settle myself, and charge my family and my neighbours to bury me; and I shall give away the books of medicine. And I have a book, the choice of the choice, that I shall give you as a present to store in your treasury. And the King said to the sage: And what is this book? He said: In it is a thing beyond counting; and the least of the secrets in it is that when you have cut off my head and opened it, and counted three leaves, then you read three lines from the page on your left, and the head will speak to you and answer you about everything you ask it about. And the King marvelled the utmost marvelling, and shook with delight, and said to him: Sage, and when I have cut off your head, it speaks? And he said: Yes, O King; and this is a marvellous thing.

Then the King sent him off with a guard kept over him, and the sage went down to his house and finished his business on that day. And on the second day the sage came up to the court, and the emirs came up, and the viziers and the chamberlains and the deputies and the lords of the state, all of them, and the court became like the flower of the garden. And there was the sage coming into the court and standing before the King, and with him an ancient book and a kohl-pot with a powder in it; and he sat down and said: Bring me a tray. And they brought him a tray, and he poured the powder into it and spread it out, and said: O King, take this book, and do not work by it until you cut off my head; and when you have cut it off, set it in that tray and order it pressed down on that powder, and when you have done that its blood will stop. Then open the book.

So the King opened it and found it stuck together, and he put his finger in his mouth and wetted it with his spittle, and opened the first leaf and the second and the third; and the leaves would not open but with labour. And the King opened six leaves and looked in them and found no writing in them, and the King said: Sage, there is nothing written in it. And the sage said: Turn more than that. So he turned in it more; and it was not but a little of time before the poison ran in him, in that hour and that moment — for the book was poisoned. Then at that the King shuddered and cried out and said: The poison has run in me. And the sage Ruyan recited, saying:

They ruled, and they grew tall in their ruling, and after a little it was as though there had been no reign. Had they done justice, justice would have been done them; but they did wrong, and Time did wrong upon them, with the blights and the bane. And they came to the morning, and the tongue of the case reciting to them: This for that; and of the age let no man complain.

And when Ruyan the sage was finished with his talk, the King fell dead that instant. So know, ifrit, that if King Yunan had spared the sage Ruyan, God would have spared him; but he refused and sought his killing, and God killed him. And you, ifrit — if you had spared me, God would have spared you.

And the morning broke upon Shahrazad, and she broke off the talk that was allowed. And her sister Dunyazad said to her: How pleasing your telling is! And she said: And where is this beside what I shall tell you the coming night, if I live and the King spares me? And they passed that night in bliss and gladness till morning. Then the King went up to the court; and when the court broke up he went into his palace and came together with his household.

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Hindawi 2022 vol. 1, pp. 43–45, 880 Arabic words → 1,619 English. Stored source: ../source-hindawi-2022-spanI.txt. The copy-text's sixth night whole — the fisherman refuses the ifrit, names the Qur'an at him and is talked round; the ifrit leads him to a pool of four-coloured fish and sinks into the ground; the fish reach the King's kitchen, and a young woman comes out of the wall and asks them whether they are abiding by the old covenant. p. 46 is blank in the printed book, and it is blank for the same reason p. 26 is.

When It Was the Sixth Night

She said: It has come to me, O fortunate King, that when the fisherman said to the ifrit: If you had spared me I would have spared you, but you wanted nothing but my killing, and so I kill you shut up in this flask and throw you into this sea — the marid screamed and said: By God, fisherman, do not do it; and spare me out of nobleness, and do not take me to task for what I did. For if I was a doer of ill, be you a doer of good; and in the proverbs that go about: You who do good to him who did ill, what he did is enough for the ill-doer. And do not do as Umama did with Atika.

The fisherman said: And what is the affair of those two? And the ifrit said: This is no time for a story, and I in the prison — until you bring me up out of it, and I will tell you their affair. And the fisherman said: There is nothing for it but your being thrown into the sea, and there is no way to your being brought out of it. For I was appealing to your pity and imploring you, and you wanted nothing but my killing, without a fault that I had earned from you; and I never did you an ill, and I did you nothing but good, in that I brought you out of the prison. And when you did that with me I knew that you are of a bad root. And know that I am throwing you into this sea for nothing else but that everyone who brings you up, I shall tell him your tale and warn him of you, and he will throw you into it a second time, and you will stay in this sea to the end of time until you see the kinds of torment.

And the ifrit said: Let me go, for this is a time for manly deeds; and I make a covenant with you that I shall never do you ill, but shall profit you with a thing that will profit you always. So the fisherman took the covenant of him that if he let him go he would never harm him, but would do the handsome thing with him; and when he had made himself sure of him with the oaths and the covenants, and had made him swear by the greatest name of God, the fisherman opened for him. And the smoke went up until it came out and came to its full, and became an ifrit deformed of shape; and he kicked the flask and threw it into the sea. And when the fisherman saw that he had thrown the flask into the sea he was certain of destruction, and he pissed in his clothes, and said: This is not a sign of good.

Then he strengthened his heart and said: Ifrit, God, be He exalted, has said: And fulfil the covenant; the covenant shall be asked after. And you have made a covenant with me and sworn that you will not betray me; and if you betray me God will requite you, for He is jealous, He gives respite and does not remit. And I have said to you the like of what the sage Ruyan said to King Yunan: Spare me and God will spare you.

And the ifrit laughed and walked in front of him and said: Fisherman, follow me. So the fisherman walked behind him, and he did not believe in his deliverance, until they went out past the outside of the city, and went up on a mountain and came down into a broad wilderness; and there in the middle of it was a pool of water. And the ifrit stood over it and ordered the fisherman to cast the net and fish. And the fisherman looked at the pool, and in it were fish of colours — the white and the red and the blue and the yellow; and the fisherman marvelled at that. Then he cast his net and drew it, and found in it four fish, every fish of a colour; and when the fisherman saw them he rejoiced.

And the ifrit said to him: Go in with them to the Sultan and offer them to him, and he will give you what will make you rich. And by God, accept my excuse, for at this time I do not know a road; and I have been in this sea a term of a thousand and eight hundred years, and have not seen the outside of the world except in this hour. And do not fish from it every day more than the one time. And I commend you to God. Then he struck the ground with his two feet, and it split open and swallowed him.

And the fisherman went off to the city, marvelling at what had happened to him with this ifrit. Then he took the fish and went in with them to his house, and brought a tub, and then filled it with water and set the fish in it, and the fish thrashed about inside the tub in the water; then he carried the tub on his head and made for the King's palace, as the ifrit had ordered him. And when the fisherman went up to the King and offered him the fish, the King marvelled the utmost marvelling at that fish which the fisherman had offered him, because he had not seen its like in his life in description or in shape. And he said: Throw this fish to the cook slave-girl. And this slave-girl the King of Rum had made him a present of three days before, and he had not tried her in a cooking.

And the vizier ordered her to fry it, and said to her: Slave-girl, the King says to you: I have saved my tears for nothing but my hard years. So let us see today your cooking and the goodness of your cookery; for someone has come to the Sultan with a gift. Then the vizier went back after he had charged her, and the King ordered him to give the fisherman four hundred dinars; and the vizier gave them to him, and he took them into his lap and went off to his house to his wife, glad and rejoicing; then he bought for his family what they needed.

This is what there was of the business of the fisherman. And as for what there was of the business of the slave-girl: she took the fish and cleaned it and ranged it in the pan; then she left the fish until its face was done, and turned it over on the second face — and there was the kitchen wall split open, and out of it came a young woman graceful of form, smooth of cheek, complete of description, kohl-dark of eye, with a lovely face and a form full of grace, clothed in a head-cloth of blue silk, and in her ears hoops, and on her wrists bracelets, and on her fingers rings with stones of price, and in her hand a rod of bamboo. And she thrust the rod into the pan and said: Fish, are you abiding by the old covenant?

And when the slave-girl saw this she fainted; and the young woman said the saying over a second time and a third, and the fish raised its head out of the pan and said: Yes, yes. Then all of it said this bayt:

If you return, we return; if you hold fast, we hold fast; and if you forsake us, then we are quits at last.

And at that the young woman turned the pan over and went out from the place she had come in by, and the kitchen wall closed up. Then the slave-girl came to and saw the four fish burnt like black charcoal; and that slave-girl said: On his first foray his stick gave way. And while she was reproaching herself, there was the vizier standing over her head, and he said to her: Bring the fish for the Sultan. And the slave-girl wept and let the vizier know how it stood and what had happened; and the vizier marvelled at that and said: This is nothing but a marvellous business.

Then he sent to the fisherman, and they brought him to him, and he said to him: Fisherman, there is nothing for it but that you bring us four fish like those you brought first. So the fisherman went out to the pool and cast his net, then drew it, and there were four fish; and he took them and came with them to the vizier, and the vizier went in with them to the slave-girl and said to her: Get up, fry them in front of me, that I may see this case. So the slave-girl got up, made the fish ready and set it in the pan on the fire; and it had not settled but a little when there was the wall split open, and the young woman had appeared, clothed in her clothing, and in her hand the rod; and she thrust it into the pan and said: Fish, fish, are you abiding by the old covenant? And the fish raised their heads and recited this bayt:

If you return, we return; if you hold fast, we hold fast; and if you forsake us, then we are quits at last.

And the morning broke upon Shahrazad, and she broke off the talk that was allowed.

Span J

Hindawi 2022 vol. 1, pp. 47–51, 1,411 Arabic words → 2,754 English, the arm's second-largest span. Stored source: ../source-hindawi-2022-spanJ.txt. The copy-text's seventh night whole — the black slave comes out of the kitchen wall and burns the fish; the King rides out to the pool, goes on alone and finds a black palace with a young man in it, half of him stone; and the young man begins the tale of his wife, the rubbish-mounds and the slave. The seventh night runs five printed pages and has no internal boundary, and the running head on p. 49 says night 9 while the running head on p. 51 says night 7 — see the log. p. 48 carries a plate, and its caption prints a sentence the narrative will print again on p. 49.

When It Was the Seventh Night

She said: It has come to me, O fortunate King, that when the fish had spoken, the young woman turned the pan over with the rod and went out from the place she had come in by, and the wall closed up; and at that the vizier stood up and said: This is a business that cannot be hidden from the King. Then he went forward to the King and told him what had happened in front of him, and he said: I must look with my own eye. So he sent to the fisherman and ordered him to bring four fish like the first, and gave him three days; and the fisherman went off to the pool and brought him the fish at once, and the King ordered that they give him four hundred dinars.

Then the King turned to the vizier and said to him: You — make the fish ready here in front of me. And the vizier said: To hear is to obey. So he fetched the pan and threw the fish into it after cleaning it, then turned it over; and there was the wall split open, and out of it came a black slave like a bull among bulls, or of the people of Ad, and in his hand a branch of a green tree; and he said in speech clear and alarming: Fish, fish, are you abiding by the old covenant? And the fish raised its head out of the pan and said: Yes, yes. And it recited this bayt:

If you return, we return; if you hold fast, we hold fast; and if you forsake us, then we are quits at last.

Then the slave came at the pan and turned it over with the branch until it became black charcoal; then the slave went off from where he had come. And when the slave was gone from their eyes the King said: This is a business there is no keeping quiet about, and this fish must have a strange affair to it. So he ordered the fetching of the fisherman; and when he was there he said to him: Where is this fish from? And he said to him: From a pool between four mountains behind this mountain that is outside your city. And the King turned to the fisherman and said to him: How many days' journey? He said to him: Our lord the Sultan, half an hour's journey. And the Sultan marvelled, and ordered the troops out from that hour of his with the fisherman; and the fisherman took to cursing the ifrit. And they went on until they climbed the mountain and came down from it to a wide open country they had not seen in the whole span of their lives,

[plate, p. 48] And the King found in the middle of the palace four lions of red gold casting the water from their mouths.

and the Sultan and all the troops marvelling at that open country they looked on between four mountains, and the fish in it of four colours: red, and white, and yellow, and blue. And the King stood marvelling and said to the troops and to whoever was there: Has any one of you seen this pool in this place? And they all said: No. And the King said: By God, I shall not go into my city, and I shall not sit on the throne of my kingship, until I know the truth of this pool and its fish. Then he ordered the people to camp about these mountains, and they camped; then he called for the vizier — and he was a vizier knowing, sensible, shrewd, learned in the way of things — and when he was there between his hands he said to him: I want to do a thing, and I am telling you of it; and that is that it came into my mind to go apart by myself this night and search out the report of this pool and its fish. So sit at the door of my tent, and say to the emirs and the viziers and the chamberlains that the Sultan is out of sorts and has ordered me to give no one leave to come in to him; and do not let anyone know what I am after. And the vizier could not go against him.

Then the King changed how he looked, and slung on his sword, and slipped out from among them, and walked the rest of his night until the morning; and he did not leave off going until the heat came hard on him, and he rested. Then he walked the rest of his day and his second night until the morning; and a blackness gleamed for him from far off, and he rejoiced and said: Perhaps I shall find someone to tell me the case of the pool and its fish. And when he came near the blackness he found it a palace built of black stones, plated with iron, and one of its two leaves open and the other shut. And the King rejoiced, and stood at the door and knocked a gentle knocking, and heard no answer; and he knocked a second time and a third, and heard no answer; and he knocked a fourth time an alarming knocking, and no one answered him. And he said: There is no doubt it is empty. So he made himself bold and went in from the palace door into its passage; then he shouted and said: People of the palace, I am a stranger and a passer-by on the road — have you anything of provision? And he said the saying over a second time and a third and heard no answer.

So he strengthened his heart and steadied himself, and went in from the passage to the middle of the palace; and he found no one in it, only that it was furnished, and in the middle of it a fountain-basin with four lions of red gold on it casting the water from their mouths like pearls and jewels, and round about it birds, and over that palace a net keeping them from going up. And he marvelled at that, and was sorry for it, since he saw no one in it to ask for news of that pool and the fish and the mountains and the palace. Then he sat down between the doors thinking; and there was a moaning from a grieving liver, and he heard it chanting this poem:

When wasting had hidden me, and my longing was plain, and sleep in my eye had been traded for waking again, I called out to longing, made greater by thoughts and their strain: O longing, spare nothing of me, and let nothing remain —

here is my heart's blood between the hardship and the pain.

And when the Sultan heard that moaning he rose to his feet and made for the side of it, and found a curtain let down over the door of a sitting-room; and he lifted it and saw behind the curtain a young man sitting on a bed raised off the ground the measure of a forearm; and he a lovely young man, of a form full of grace, and a tongue of a ready pace, and a bright brow, and a red cheek, and a mole on the seat of his cheek like a shield of ambergris — as the poet said:

And one slender: out of his hair and his brow mankind has walked in darkness and light. Your two eyes have not looked on a handsomer view in all that is offered to sight: like the green mole set over the cheek that is crim— —son, and beneath the eyeball's black night.

And the King rejoiced at him and gave him peace, and the boy sitting, and on him a tunic of silk with a border of gold, but on him the mark of grief; and he returned the peace to the King and said to him: My lord, hold me excused for not standing up. And the King said: Young man, tell me about this pool, and about its coloured fish, and about this palace, and the reason for your being alone in it, and what is the reason for your weeping? And when the young man heard this talk his tears came down on his cheek and he wept a hard weeping; and the King marvelled and said to him: What makes you weep, young man? And he said: How am I not to weep, and this is how it stands with me? And he put out his hand to his skirts and lifted them, and there was his lower half down to his two feet stone, and from his navel to the hair of his head a man.

Then the young man said: Know, King, that this fish has a marvellous business to it, and were it written with needles on the inner corners of the eyes it would be a lesson to whoever would be lessoned. And that, my lord, is that my father was king of this city, and his name was Mahmud, lord of the Black Islands and lord of these four mountains; he stayed in the kingship seventy years. Then my father died and I took the sultanate after him, and I married my father's brother's daughter; and she loved me a great loving, so that if I was away from her she would not eat and would not drink until she saw me. And she stayed in my keeping five years, until one day of the days I went off to the bath; and I ordered the cook to make ready food for us for the supper, and then I came into this palace and lay down in the place where I sleep, and ordered two slave-girls to fan my face. And one sat at my head and the other at my foot; and I was uneasy at her being away and sleep did not take me, only that my eye was shut and my soul awake.

And I heard the one at my head saying to the one at my foot: Masudah, our master's youth is a poor thing, and what a waste of him with our mistress, the wicked, the sinning. And the other said: God curse adulterous women — but one like our master, and his manners, is no fit for this adulteress who passes every night in a bed that is not his. And the one at my head said: Our master is a fool, since he does not ask after her. And the other said: Damn you — and has our master any knowledge of how it stands with her, or does she leave him to his own choosing? No: she works him a working in the cup of drink he drinks every night before sleeping, and puts the drug in it, and he sleeps, and does not feel what is going on, and does not know where she goes nor what she does. For after she has given him the drink she puts on her clothes and goes out from him and is away until the dawn, and comes to him and smokes something at his nose, and he wakes out of his sleep.

And when I heard the talk of the slave-girls the light in my face became darkness, and I could not believe that the night had come on. And my father's brother's daughter came from the bath, and we spread the table-cloth and ate, and we sat an hour of time as boon-companions, as the custom was; then I called for the drink I drink at sleeping-time, and she handed me the cup. And I turned aside from it and made as though I drank it as my custom is, and poured it into my bosom, and lay down in the time and the hour; and there she was saying: Sleep, and I wish you may not get up. By God, I have hated you and hated your face, and my soul has wearied of your embrace. Then she got up and put on her most splendid clothes and perfumed herself and slung on a sword, and opened the palace door and went out.

And I got up and followed her until she went out of the palace, and cut through the markets of the city until she came to the city gates; and she spoke with talk I do not understand, and the locks fell down and the gates opened, and she went out and I behind her and she did not feel it, until she came to a place among the rubbish-mounds. And she came to a stronghold with a dome in it built of clay, and it had a door; and she went into it, and I went up onto the roof of the dome and looked down on her — and there she was, gone in to a black slave, one of his two lips a spread and his second lip a bed, and his lips picking up the sand from among the pebbles, and he wet, and lying on a little of cane-straw. And she kissed the ground between his hands; and that slave raised his head to her and said to her: Damn you — what is the reason for your sitting till this hour? The blacks were with us, and they drank the drink, and every one of them went off with his mistress, and I would not drink because of you.

And she said: My lord, and darling of my heart, do you not know that I am married to my father's brother's son, and I hate the whole creation in his face, and I loathe myself in his company? And but that I fear for your feelings, I would have made the city a desolation where the owl and the raven make lamentation, and I would carry its stones away behind Mount Qaf. And the slave said: You lie, whore. And I swear by the right of the manhood of the blacks — or else our manly deeds are the manly deeds of the whites — if you go on sitting till this hour of this day, I shall not keep company with you and shall not lay my body on your body, you traitress. Do you turn on me for the sake of your lust, you stinking thing, you basest of the whites?

The King said: And when I heard her talk, and I looking with my own eye at what passed between the two of them, the world became darkness in my face and I did not know my soul, in what place it was. And my father's brother's daughter stood there weeping to him and abasing herself between his hands and saying to him: My darling and fruit of my heart, no one but you is left to me; and if you drive me off — my ruin, my darling, light of my eye! And she did not leave off weeping and imploring him until he was pleased with her; and she rejoiced and got up and pulled off her clothes and her dress, and said to him: My lord, have you anything for your slave-girl to eat? And he said to her: Lift the trough — under it are cooked mice-bones; eat them and crunch them. And go to this crock, you will find beer in it: drink it. So she got up and ate and drank and washed her hands, and came with the slave onto the cane-straw and stripped herself bare, and went in with him under the rag and the tatters.

And when I looked at these doings my father's brother's daughter had done, I was gone out of existence; and I came down from off the top of the dome, and went in and took the sword from my father's brother's daughter, and meant to kill the two of them. And I struck the slave first on his neck, and I thought that he was finished.

And the morning broke upon Shahrazad, and she broke off the talk that was allowed. Then when the morning came the King went into the place of his judging, and the court was knit up until the end of the day; then the King went up to his palace, and her sister Dunyazad said to her: Finish your story for us. She said: With love and honour.

Translator's log

Written at translation time. Frozen 2026-08-14 before the comparators were opened and before any study of this translation was designed. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims; any evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only. Numbering is cumulative across the whole work (R05 §3): span A takes D1–D14.

The governing decision

D1 — register: plain modern English for the narration, marked formula for the seams. The single decision the rest hangs on, and it was made against the received English Nights rather than in ignorance of it. The Arabic here is Middle Arabic: paratactic و-chains almost without subordination, a small and repeating vocabulary, colloquial intrusions, and formulae at the joints. It is not elevated classical prose and it does not read as old. So the narration is rendered in plain modern English with the parataxis kept — the and … and … and chains are not broken into periods, because they are the source's actual sentence-shape and the temptation to tidy them is a temptation to write a different book. The formulaic seams are the exception: the basmala, the doxology, فقد حُكِي والله أعلم, فيما مضى من قديم الزمان, بالسمع والطاعة are marked as formulae in the Arabic — by rhyme, by fixity, by being unparaphrasable — and are rendered as marked English formulae, with rhyme where D2 could get one. Rejected: a uniform archaising diction across narration and formula alike. It would flatten the one contrast the source's prose is built on.

D2 — saj' (rhymed prose): try for an English rhyme at each locus; take it only where the sense survives; log every loss. The rhyme chains of the preamble are the most conspicuous feature of the span and the most obviously unreachable. What was attempted and what was got:

Eight loci; five carried, one partial, two lost. The verdict column is parsed by checks.py, not read. The English rhymes are all -ing or monosyllabic and none of them falls where the Arabic rhyme falls. internal-judgment-only: I do not claim they do the same work.

Lexis and reference

D3 — عبدًا أسود من العبيد → one of the black slaves. The partitive من العبيد is formulaic filler and is absorbed. The racial specification is not softened, not generalised to servant, and not annotated. It is in the source three times in this span, it is load-bearing for what the frame tale is about, and a translator who removes it is answering a question the reader has not been allowed to ask. Rejected: a black slave, one of the slaves (English will not carry the partitive without sounding like an error).

D4 — ونيك → fucking. The one word in the span where the source's register is obscene rather than merely plain. نيك is the ordinary vulgar Arabic verb, unmarked as slang and unmistakably coarse, in a sentence otherwise built of neutral verbal nouns (بوس, عناق). Alternatives live at the desk: swiving (period-blunt, but converts obscenity into quaintness and would be the only archaism in the narration, against D1); screwing (modern but jocular, lighter than the Arabic); rutting (adds an animal judgement the Arabic does not make); omission. Chosen: match, do not exceed and do not soften. Recorded here because span A's collation found the same word deleted from a modern Arabic digitisation (../collation.md §3 row 6), and because the two published hands will be read at this locus.

D5 — فسقية → fountain-basin. A built pool with a jet. Pool loses the architecture, fountain loses the water one can sit in and undress beside, which the scene needs. Compound kept.

D6 — الخرزة التي أعطيتها لك في قصري — a textual crux, rendered and flagged. Literally the bead which I gave you in my palace — but he is going back to fetch it, so it cannot already have been given. Rendered the bead that I had meant for you, in my palace, which is what the narrative requires. Note also that at the first telling the object was only حاجة نسيها (a thing he had forgotten); the bead is a retrospective specification. The inconsistency is the source's and is kept.

D7 — بالسمع والطاعة → To hear is to obey, both times. Declared as primed (see contamination above): this is the English tradition's formula, not something derived here. Literal alternatives (with hearing and obedience) are available and were rejected as less formulaic in English than the Arabic is in Arabic. Both occurrences take the same English, which is the fixity the formula has in the source.

D8 — اسودت الدنيا في وجهه → the world went black in his face. A calque, kept because English has the idiom's parts and not the idiom, so the calque reads as strange-but-parsable rather than as error. Rejected: everything went dark before him, which is the English idiom and dissolves the Arabic one.

D9 — هذه العاهرة → this whore. عاهرة is coarse and contemptuous; this harlot is the register of the received English Nights and would be D1's flattening in miniature.

Syntax and shape

D10 — the و-parataxis is kept, including at the cost of English sentence-rhythm. Span A's longest English sentence runs 84 words on nine coordinating ands, because its Arabic does. This is the decision most likely to be read as a fault and it is deliberate; it is also the decision a later span is most likely to be tempted to quietly reverse, which is what R05's append-only rule exists to catch.

D11 — ولم يزل / ولم يزالوا → did not leave off / did not leave off in that state, uniformly. A high-frequency Nights formula meaning continued. Rendering it idiomatically (they went on) each time would hide that it is one formula; the uniform slightly-odd English keeps it visible and countable for later spans.

D12 — verbal-noun doublets kept as doublets: الصيد والقنص → the hunt and the chase; الحسن والجمال → beauty and loveliness; القهر والغم → rage and grief; البسط والانشراح → ease and gladness of heart. English can do these and there is no reason to collapse them.

D13 — ينشرح صدرك → your breast will open, calqued, and الانشراح above rendered gladness of heart — the same root twice, rendered two ways. This is an inconsistency I chose: the calque survives in direct speech, where a reader will take it as the speaker's idiom, and does not survive in narration, where it would read as a mistake. Flagged for the register as an open question, not settled.

D14 — speech is unquoted, as in the source. The Arabic marks speech with قال ... فقال and no punctuation of quotation; the copy-text's editor supplies colons. Kept as colons without quotation marks. Rejected: full English quotation marks, which would impose a speech/narration boundary the Middle Arabic does not draw, and which is one of the places the received English Nights is most visibly a nineteenth-century book.

What was hard, in order

1. The preamble's saj'. Half an hour of the sitting went on eight loci in eighty words. Nothing else in the span is comparable in cost per word.
2. Deciding D1 against the received English. The pull toward Wardour Street diction on this text is enormous and comes from the translations rather than from the Arabic, which is the clearest thing this span taught. internal-judgment-only.
3. D4. Not the choosing — the source is unambiguous — but the recognising that the surrounding English had to stay plain for the choice to mean anything.
4. The parataxis. Every sentence offered to become three.

Translator's log — span B

Written at translation time, 2026-08-14. Frozen before either comparator was opened for span B and before the span-B study limb was designed. Numbering continues from span A: span B takes D15–D28. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims; any evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only.

The governing decision of this span

D15 — verse: set as verse, one English line per Arabic hemistich, and carry the monorhyme at the bayt-ends; take it only where the sense survives; record every loss. The register's open question 3 (register.md) is settled here. Three options were live and the third was chosen:

• verse as prose, run into the narrative — refused, because the source marks the shift twice over, by the tag (كما قال الشاعر / وقال بعضهم) and by the metre, and a translation that dissolves the marking hides a formal fact about the work;
• verse as free-verse lines, no rhyme — refused, because the one thing every one of these poems is built on is a single rhyme repeated to the end, and unrhymed lines keep the shape of the container and none of its content;
• verse as rhymed English lines, chosen. This is S1 (the saj' policy) extended from rhymed prose to verse rather than a new rule, which is why it is defensible: attempt the rhyme, take it only where the sense survives, log every loss.

Metre is not attempted and the loss is recorded here rather than at each poem. The three poems are in khafīf, kāmil majzūʾ and khafīf; quantitative metre has no English equipment and an accentual substitute would be a different formal claim, not a carried one.

D16 — the verse takes a higher register than the narration, and this is a departure from V1 made deliberately. V1 binds the narration to plain modern English and forbids archaising diction. The verse is not the narration: the prose of this work is Middle Arabic and the quoted poetry is classical, with case endings, inversion, and a diction two centuries older than its frame. The register gap is in the source, so it is put into the English — overthrown, between her hands, Give over blaming are all higher than anything in the narration and are meant to be. Rejected: flattening the poems to the narration's register, which would erase the one place the source audibly changes voice. New register entry V8.

D17 — the one Arabic rhyme English can carry mechanically is the pronominal-suffix rhyme, and the second poem is 5 of 5 on it. Poem 2 rhymes on ـهن (-hinna, "of them", feminine plural) — a grammatical suffix, not a lexical rhyme. English has a matching suffixal device in the of-genitive, so every bayt could be brought to rest on of them:

Five of five carried, with no sense sacrificed at any of the five — the only place in two spans of this work where that has happened. The cost is elsewhere and is real: of them is a mild inversion five times over, and English will read as slightly stilted where the Arabic reads as ordinary. internal-judgment-only on the last clause. What the decision teaches is a rule of selection, not of this poem: where an Arabic rhyme is carried by a bound morpheme that English also has, the rhyme is reachable; where it is carried by the lexical roots, it is not.

D18 — poems 1 and 3, and what the rhyme cost.

Fourteen rhyme positions across three poems, fourteen carried, three of them paid for in sense. The contrast with span A's prose census is the thing worth recording: at eight saj' loci in prose the same hand got five, one partial and two lost, and here it got everything. Verse gave the translator a licence prose did not — a line-end to aim at, a line-break to absorb the awkwardness, and a reader who expects a rhymed line to be arranged for its rhyme. internal-judgment-only.

Rhymed prose in span B

D19 — two saj' loci in the prose of this span; one lost, one carried.

Locus 9 was worked at longest and yielded nothing: every English rhyme reachable on stature / skull required replacing one of the three body-parts, and the members are the whole content. What was carried instead is the repetition — the copy-text says القامة twice, and the English says stature twice, so the oddity survives even though the sound does not. That oddity is itself a textual question, see D28. Locus 10 cost nothing: roaring for العجاج and warring for المتلاطم are both inside the ordinary range of the words. Cumulative saj' count for this hand over spans A and B: ten loci, six carried, one partial, three lost. Counted by checks.py.

D20 — the cognate accusative is kept as a cognate accusative, twice, three lines apart. فيقتلكما شرَّ قتلة → he will kill you the foulest of killings; ارصعا رصعًا عنيفًا → Ram me a hard ramming. English has the figure (die the death, dream a dream) and it is marked in English roughly as it is marked in Arabic — a little formal, a little emphatic. Rejected: kill you horribly and do it to me, and hard, which are what the sentences mean and which erase a device the source uses twice in three lines. It is used twice in three lines by the same speaker, which is a fact about her voice, and a translation that idiomatises both occurrences deletes the fact.

Register and lexis

D21 — the source has three grades of sexual vocabulary in this span and the English keeps them apart. This is V5 (crude terms rendered crudely — matched, not exceeded, not softened) meeting a span that grades the vocabulary rather than using one register:

Matching the grade, not the temperature, is the decision. A translator who renders all three at the obscene end coarsens the maiden and the poet alike; one who renders all three at the anatomical end produces the received English Nights. internal-judgment-only on that sentence.

D22 — غلمان → serving-boys. خدم was already spent on servants in span A (T2 region), and collapsing the two would lose a distinction the source draws. Rejected: pages (archaising, against V1), attendants (Latinate, against V1), servants (collides), boys (carries a colonial charge in English that غلام does not carry in Arabic — this is the alternative that was hardest to refuse, and it was refused on the D3 principle: do not add a question the reader was not allowed to ask). Serving-boys is built like D5's fountain-basin: a compound, plain, countable.

D23 — جني and عفريت are kept as two words, jinni and ifrit, for one being. The source uses both of the same creature within four lines. English could regularise; the register's countability principle (T4, D11) says do not.

D24 — على غفلة قرن هذا العفريت → unbeknown to the horn of this ifrit — a crux, calqued and flagged. Literally in a heedlessness of the horn of this ifrit. قرن is horn, and what it is doing here is not clear at the desk: it may be a euphemism for the ifrit himself, it may be the horn he is imagined to have, and the cuckold's horn is a live English association that may or may not be in the Arabic. Rendered literally and flagged, as D6 flagged the bead — the second textual crux in this work rendered rather than solved, and the second to be handed forward.

D25 — the calque rule is settled, and the register's open question 1 is discharged. D13 left انشراح rendered two ways and asked whether the split (calque survives in direct speech, not in narration) was a policy or an inconsistency. Span B answers it: it was an inconsistency, and the real rule is grammatical, not positional. Span B calques طار عقله من رأسه → his mind flew from his head in the narration, and بين يديها → between her hands in the verse, both without difficulty. What those two have and الانشراح lacked is a clause: a subject and a verb, which give an English reader enough to take the phrase as a figure. A bare abstract noun inside a doublet (البسط والانشراح) gives them nothing and reads as an error. New register entry V7: calque where the source gives a full clause; render by sense where it gives a bare abstract noun.

D26 — سامح and عفا are kept apart. تسامحينا من هذا الأمر → let us off this business; span A's اعفُ عني من أن أذكره → excuse me from telling you. Two Arabic verbs of excusing, two English ones, in the same relation.

D27 — استمروا is not rendered with T4's formula, and that is the point of T4. واستمروا كذلك إلى العصر → they went on like that until the afternoon, while ولم يزالا four lines later takes did not leave off. Span A bound ولم يزل to one uniform English so the formula would stay countable across the work; span B is the first span where the source uses a different verb in the same slot, and the binding did its work — the difference is visible in the English because the formula was not idiomatised away.

D28 — two copy-text readings carried as they stand, both flagged for the collation. (i) واسع الصدر والقامة repeats القامة from the first member of the same rhyme chain, which is either a rhetorical repetition or a printer's dittography; the second witness reads simply واسع الصدر, without the third member. Rendered as the copy-text has it (wide of chest and of stature). (ii) يا سيدةَ الحرائر التي قد اختطفتُها ليلةَ عرسها addresses the girl in the third person (whom I snatched away on her wedding night) where the second witness has the second person (اختطفتك … عرسك). Rendered as the copy-text has it. This is the first place in this work where the second witness may be the sounder reading, and it is recorded rather than adopted; see ../collation.md §6.

What was hard, in order

1. Poem 1's monorhyme. Five rhyme positions on one sound in a quatrain, and English does not have Arabic's supply of rhyme-words, because Arabic rhymes on inflectional endings that recur by grammar. Finding -own took longer than the rest of the poem.
2. D21, holding three grades apart while the surrounding narration stayed plain — the same problem span A's D4 had, one grade wider.
3. Locus 9. Forty minutes for a rhyme that never came, and the decision to carry the repetition instead was made only after giving up on the sound.
4. D16, letting the verse be more elevated than the narration after a whole span spent refusing elevation. It felt like a breach of V1 and is written down as a departure, not as an application.

Translator's log — span C

Written at translation time, 2026-08-15. Frozen before either comparator was opened for span C and before the span-C study limb was designed. Numbering continues: span C takes D29–D42. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims; any evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only.

The governing decision of this span

D29 — the embedded tale is not marked off from the frame, because the copy-text does not mark it off. The vizier's fable of the ass and the ox runs straight out of his own line of dialogue (أخشى عليك أن يحصل لك ما حصل للحمار والثور) and straight back into it 500 words later (ثم قال الوزير لابنته شهرزاد), with no heading, no break and no change of type. Witness 2 has a heading there — حكاية الحمار والثور مع صاحب الزرع — and the English supplies none, following the copy-text (../collation.md §7, row 2).

Rejected, and it was the live alternative: an italic heading or a section rule, on the ground that an English reader loses the frame without one. Refused because this work's entire architecture is embedding, and where a recension puts its seams — and whether it puts any — is a fact about the text and not a service to be added. The first tale-within-a-tale in the Nights arriving unannounced is the thing to be carried; a translation that announces it has answered a question the copy-text declines to answer. The cost is real and is recorded: the English reader, like the Arabic one, is five sentences into the fable before it is clear that a fable has started.

Figures of sound in span C

D30 — the cognate figure is now a countable class, and this span has five, all five carried. T13 bound the cognate accusative at span B on two instances. Span C has five, of three grammatical shapes, and English took every one:

This is the cheapest device in the work so far and it is worth saying why: English has the figure natively (die the death, dream a dream, live a long life) and marks it roughly as Arabic marks it — a little formal, a little emphatic — so nothing has to be substituted or spent. Contrast D19: saj' costs sense at nearly every locus. Two figures, one language pair, opposite prices.

D31 — three loci of saj' and muwāzana; one carried, one partial, one lost.

Locus 11 was worked and abandoned: every English rhyme reachable on kings / nations required replacing one of the two, and the two are the content. Locus 12 is not strictly a rhyme — maknūsan / marshūshan share the pattern and the vowels but not the rawiyy (s against sh) — and the English carries alliteration where the Arabic has matched pattern: a substituted device, not a carried one, which is why it is partial. This is the second substitution in the work (D19 locus 9 substituted repetition for rhyme), and both substitutions went the same way: English reached for a device it has in quantity rather than for the one the Arabic used. Locus 13 cost nothing, because the Arabic figure there is repetition of a word, and English repeats words as easily as Arabic does.

Cumulative saj' / muwāzana count for this hand over spans A–C: thirteen loci, seven carried, two partial, four lost.

Register and lexis

D32 — الوَطْء takes the plain clinical word. ولم يَبْقَ في تلك المدينة بنتٌ تتحمَّل الوَطْء → there was not left in that city a girl who could bear intercourse. الوطء is the jurists' term — blunt, technical, unembarrassed, and not obscene — and intercourse stands in the same place in English. Rejected: fit to be bedded (prettifies, and invents a decorum the sentence has not got) and the obscene register (V5 binds matched, not exceeded, and this word is not نيك). This completes the three grades D21 opened: obscene (نيك), coarse (عاهرة), clinical (الوطء).

D33 — ضرط → farted. V5, without hedging. Rejected: broke wind, which belongs to a politer English than this Arabic, in a sentence whose entire mechanism is that a coarse noise makes a man laugh until he falls over backwards.

D34 — the fable's colloquial layer is named here and is largely not carried. Inside the fable the copy-text drops further into spoken Egyptian than anywhere in spans A–B, at three marked points: الغيط (field, against classical الحقل), النَّاف (the yoke-beam — a farmer's word, not in the classical lexicon), and رايح يموت (participle + imperfect, a spoken future, in the dog's mouth). The English has the field, the yoke, and — the one that is marked — our master is off to die. Recorded as a loss, and the reason is a rule, not an oversight: V1 fixes the narration at plain modern English, and the English resources for marking a rustic speaker are all regional (a Cockney dog, a Yorkshire ass), which would import an England into an Egyptian farmyard. The alternative was live and was refused.

D35 — قاضي → qadi, joining vizier (T3), jinni and ifrit (T10) under one rule: an office that is not an English office keeps its name. Judge would furnish an English courtroom, and the man is being fetched to witness a will in a village.

D36 — two more formulaic seams marked as formulae (V2). حُبًّا وكرامة → With love and honour; والسلام, closing the ass's speech, → and peace — the Arabic letter-ending used in speech, kept as the odd little full stop it is.

D37 — رمى عنق زوجته → struck off the neck of his wife: the verb gives, the noun does not. V7 sends a full clause toward calque, but threw the neck of his wife is not English at any level. The noun is kept — neck, not head — because the Arabic idiom counts necks, the same sentence counts more of them (وكذلك أعناق الجواري والعبيد), and the work will count them again.

Three copy-text irregularities carried as they stand

D38 — all three are flagged, none is repaired, and the third is the interesting one.

1. وما الذي جرى لها — feminine singular where the antecedent is the dual the ass and the ox; witness 2 reads لهما. Rendered as a dual (what was it that happened to them): English cannot show the disagreement without a footnote, so the disagreement is recorded here instead.
2. وما سبب ضحك — ضحك bare where the sense requires ضحكك (your laughing); witness 2 reads ضحكك. Rendered what the cause of your laughing was, i.e. as witness 2 has it, and this is the second place in three spans where witness 2 may hold the sounder reading (../collation.md §7, and §6 row 9 for the first).
3. The sisters' script does not match its performance, and the mismatch is carried. Shahrazad instructs Dunyazad to say حدِّثيني حديثًا غريبًا — tell me a strange tale. On the night Dunyazad says حدِّثينا حديثًا — tell us a tale, plural, and strange gone. Witness 2 regularises both to حدثينا. The English keeps the copy-text's two forms, singular then plural, with and then without strange. The frame's whole engine is a scripted speech being performed on cue; whether the performance matches the script is exactly the kind of small discrepancy a tidying hand removes, and removing it here would delete the only evidence in the frame tale that the two sisters are improvising.

The poem

D39 — two bayts, rhyme -ūmu, no taṣrīʿ; two rhyme positions, two carried, nothing paid. S3, S4 and V8 applied without incident: verse set as verse, one line per hemistich, monorhyme at the bayt-ends (stay / away), register lifted above the narration. يفنى … تفنى — the same verb twice — is carried by passes … pass. The register's open question 7 (does the cost of rhyming a first-bayt taṣrīʿ scale with the poem?) is not settled here: this poem has no taṣrīʿ. It is carried forward untouched.

The register's open question 2 carried a false statement of fact, and it is withdrawn

D40 — the night-closing formula does not fall at the end of p. 18. register.md open question 2 states that وأدرك شهرزاد الصباح فسكتت عن الكلام المباح "first falls at the end of PDF p. 18". It does not. Page 18 ends the frame tale at فرِحَ بسماع الحديث; page 19 opens the first night under its own heading (فلما كانت الليلة ١) with the first embedded tale (حكاية التاجر مع العفريت), and the formula falls at the close of night 1, beyond this span. The open question itself stands, unmoved and still owed; the locational claim inside it is withdrawn as false, because a register entry that says where something is will send a later span to look there.

The study limb's loci, classified and frozen here

D41 — this is the step the arm exists to take, so the ordering is stated exactly. The confirmatory run of RS-20260814g's question needs its loci fixed before either published hand is opened for span C — that was the pre-run critic's BLOCKING 1 at step 2, and it is the whole reason step 3 is a step. The classification below is written at translation time, from the Arabic alone, by rules stated before the loci were looked for.

PATTERNED — a locus where the copy-text repeats a sound, by exactly one of two figures: (a) saj' / muwāzana — two or more adjacent cola whose final words share an end-rhyme or an identical morphological pattern; (b) cognate figure — two words of one root standing in a single clause, one governing or echoing the other. The narrative speech-tag (قال / فقال / فقالت) is excluded from (b) as the text's default connective rather than a figure. All loci satisfying this are enumerated and the first eight in copy-text order are taken.

The ninth and last locus in the enumeration, unused, is أُرضي هذه وأغضب هذه (two cola ending in the same word). It is named here so that "the first eight" can be checked rather than trusted.

PLAIN — span C's prose segmented on the copy-text's sentence punctuation (., ؟, !), a segment eligible if it is 9–24 Arabic words, contains no PT locus and no verse; then an affirmative plainness audit excludes any surviving segment that contains (i) a rhyme or matched pattern between adjacent cola, (ii) a cognate figure, or (iii) a near-synonym doublet (T7). The first eight eligible-and-audited segments in copy-text order are PL1–PL8.

One exemption inside the audit, stated because it decides two cells: a rhyme produced solely by shared inflection on coordinated verbs of the same conjugation is not a figure. In Arabic any two coordinated verbs of one conjugation rhyme automatically; counting that would make nearly every sentence in the work PATTERNED, and it is the same reasoning S4 records for verse.

The audit excludes two segments that the band alone would have admitted, and both would have entered the first eight:

• segment 4, ما حصل … يحصل — root repetition (ishtiqāq), ح-ص-ل;
• segment 23, فعل … مثل ما فعل — the same verb repeated in one clause.

D42 — a fact about this span that the study limb must live with, written down before it is inconvenient. Six of the eight PL segments are direct speech and two are narration, while all eight PT loci sit in narration or in reported description. That is the same confound the pre-run critic named at step 2 (register and speech-act type travelling with the domain), it is a property of where these figures fall in this text and not of any choice made here, and the design that uses these loci is required to carry it as a limit rather than to discover it.

What was hard, in order

1. D29, refusing the heading. Everything in a translator's training says to help the reader in at the top of an embedded tale, and the copy-text's refusal to do so is easy to read as a defect of the edition rather than a fact about it. The decision was made twice, the second time after seeing that witness 2 does have a heading, which is what made it a decision rather than a default.
2. D34, the farmyard. The fable is in a lower Arabic than anything the register was built for, and every English answer available is a regional English. Refusing all of them leaves the fable sounding more decorous in English than it is in Arabic, and there is no version of this span in which that loss is not taken somewhere.
3. D32, the third grade. Finding the English word that is blunt without being obscene took longer than either of the other two grades did at span B, because English distributes its sexual vocabulary between the clinical and the coarse with very little in between, and Arabic has a whole jurists' register sitting exactly there.
4. D41, enumerating rather than choosing. The honest way to fix the loci before opening the comparators is to write the rule first and then apply it, and the first pass produced a list that included a ninth locus and two segments the audit then removed. Writing down what the rule rejected was more work than writing down what it kept, and it is the only part of this that a later session can check.

Translator's log — span D

Written at translation time, 2026-08-15. Frozen before the comparators were opened for this span and before the study limb was designed. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims; any evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only. Span D takes D43–D55.

The governing decision of this span

D43 — the night-closing formula, and the one decision in this work that will be made a thousand times. وأدرك شهرزادَ الصباحُ فسكتَتْ عن الكلامِ المباح. It is two cola, it rhymes (al-ṣabāḥ / al-mubāḥ), it is the sentence that turns a collection of tales into one work, and in the received text it recurs about a thousand times verbatim. Whatever is written here is written for every night after this one, so the decision is fixed here and becomes V12.

The contamination is declared on the face of it, because it is specific and it decides the outcome. Before span A was translated the lead had already seen Burton's rendering of this sentence — the priming event is recorded in this page's contamination block — and it rhymes, on day / say. That rhyme is therefore not available to this translation: taking it would be taking his solution, and it would also corrupt the one thing this arm measures, which is what two published hands did with this formula against what a third hand does independently. The knowledge cannot be unhad, so it is fenced instead: the pair Burton found is excluded by name, and what is written below was reached without it.

The candidates, and why each was refused or taken:

What V12 carries and what it loses, stated plainly. The end-rhyme is lost. In its place the same seam gets an English figure of sound the Arabic does not have there — broke upon / broke off, one verb in two senses — so this is compensation at the site, not carriage. That distinction is the one RS-20260815-supplied-sound-confirm was built on, and it applies to the lead here as much as to Burton: the difference is that the copy-text does have a sound-figure at this seam, so what is supplied stands where something was lost, rather than where nothing was. Coded partial in D52, and the register records the loss rather than hiding it inside the compensation.

D44 — the night-opening formula. قالت: بلغني أيها الملك السعيد → She said: It has come to me, O fortunate King. This is the closing formula's twin — the sentence that opens every night — and the same priming applies: the received English is "It hath reached me, O auspicious King." Reached is the obvious verb for بلغ and is not conceded, but أيها الملك السعيد is taken as fortunate rather than auspicious: سعيد is happy, fortunate — what the King is, not what he portends — and auspicious moves it to omen. Archaising hath is refused by V1. Becomes V13.

The device this span turned up, and why it decides more than a phrase

D45 — the shroud is carried under an arm twice in one night, and the two must match in English. Inside the tale, the merchant أخذ كفنه تحت إبطه — took his shroud under his arm — and goes out to be killed. Sixty lines later, in the frame, وطلع الوزير بالكفن تحت إبطه: the vizier comes up to court with the shroud under his arm, for Shahrazad. The phrase is identical in Arabic, the two men are in the same position, and the second is unreadable as a rhyme with the first unless the English repeats itself exactly. It does: took his shroud under his arm / came up with the shroud under his arm. The rule this fixes: where the copy-text repeats wording across a seam between the frame and an embedded tale, the English repeats it, at the cost of any local improvement. Becomes V14. The same rule governs من أولها إلى آخِرها — from its first to its last — twice in one paragraph, on two tellings of the same story to two different old men.

This is not a small point of housekeeping and it is what the study limb goes after: a formula's whole content is that it is the same words again.

Register and lexis

D46 — شيخ → old man, not sheikh. T14 keeps the name of an office English has not got (qadi, vizier, and T10's jinni and ifrit). The three شيوخ of this tale hold no office; the word denotes age, and the copy-text says so at the first of them (شيخ كبير, a great old man). Sheikh in English is an office or a title and would invent a rank the tale does not give them. Becomes T16.

D47 — الديوان → the court, a declared departure from T14's principle. انفضَّ الديوان closes the span: the ruler's audience-session breaks up. By T14 this should keep its name, and English has the loanword. It is refused because the loanword has been captured: divan in modern English is a couch, and the sentence would read as furniture. T14 is therefore stated with its boundary — an office that is not an English office keeps its name, unless the English form of the name has been taken over by something else. Becomes T17.

D48 — وحشاشةَ كبدي → the life of my liver, and V7 is extended to concrete metaphor. V7 splits on grammar: calque a full clause, render a bare abstract noun by sense. This is neither — a concrete possessive metaphor for a beloved child. It is calqued, with T8 (the world went black in his face) as the precedent: an English reader given a liver and a life can see a figure, which is what the Arabic gives an Arabic reader. V7 now reads: clause, or concrete image → calque; bare abstract noun → sense.

D49 — وخرج رغمًا عن أنفه → and went out in spite of his own nose. Calqued under the extended V7, and the calque is nearly free here: the English in spite of is itself a fossil of the same figure, so the phrase reads as a live idiom being made visible rather than as an error. The alternative — against his will — is what every English reader already has and shows nothing.

D50 — سرية → concubine. Added to T2's slave vocabulary (عبد slave, جارية slave-girl): سرية is a slave-concubine, the mother of the enchanted son, and the tale turns on her being property that can be handed to a herdsman. Concubine is the plain word and is not softened. Becomes T18.

D51 — مأوى الجن → a lodging of the jinn. Haunt is the idiomatic English and is refused: it imports the ghost, and the jinn of this tale are corporeal, married, litigious and armed. Becomes T19.

Figures of sound in span D

D52 — every locus, coded, with the loss written where there is one. Eight loci of criterion (a) — saj' or matched pattern — enumerated from the copy-text before the English was written:

Two carried, five partial and one carried-with-a-supply out of eight — and two of the three supplies (loci 1, 7, 8) are the translator putting an English sound-figure where the Arabic figure would not come over. The register does not forbid this; D43 is the argument for it. It is written down because a hand that does it unrecorded is exactly what this arm has spent two study limbs measuring in somebody else.

D53 — the cognate figure, T13: nine instances in this span, nine carried. كلَّ ذي حقٍّ حقَّه every claimant his claim · ما دَينُك إلا دَيْنٌ عظيم your debt is no debt but a mighty debt · وحكايتك حكاية عجيبة your tale is a marvellous tale · حكيتُ لك حكايتي tell you my tale · طرأت لي سفرةٌ … فسافرتُ a travelling came up for me … and I travelled · بكت بكاءً شديدًا wept a bitter weeping · فندمتُ … لا ينفعني الندم repented … repentance was no use · فتعجب الوزير غاية العجب marvelled the utmost marvelling · عِبرةً لمَنِ اعتبر a lesson to whoever would be lessoned. Sixteen instances over four spans, sixteen carried — the register's most consistently met rule, and the reason is structural rather than lucky: English has enough deverbal nouns to answer a Semitic root twice in one clause.

D54 — T10 tested and held. In 762 words the copy-text names one being eight times عفريت and three times الجني, switching across a sentence boundary with nothing in between — the merchant finishes addressing العفريت and the next clause reads فاستوثق منه الجني وأطلقه — and a third form appears when the old man flatters him as تاج ملوك الجان, crown of the kings of the jann. Two further instances of الجن are the collective, the jinn whose lodging the place is. Every instance is followed and none regularised, which is T10 doing what it was written for. A translator smoothing this to one word would tidy away the fact that the text has two.

One thing excluded from the span, said out loud

D55 — the copy-text's illustration caption is apparatus, not text. Page 21 carries a plate whose caption is فقالَت لها: باللهِ عليكِ يا أختي حدِّثينا حديثًا نقطع به سهَر ليلتنا — a sentence from span C, already translated there, reused by the Hindawi editors under a picture. It is not part of the running text of night 1 and is excluded from the span and from the word count. Recorded because a later collation will find it in the source file's page and should not read it as a variant.

What was hard, in order

1. D43, and it was hard in a way no previous span has been. The problem was not finding an English rhyme; one exists, and the lead knew it before it started. The problem was that knowing it made every rhyme the desk produced suspect — each one had to be checked against a solution already in the room. What settled it was writing the excluded pair down by name, which converts an invisible contamination into a stated constraint. Four candidates and about an hour for one sentence, which is the correct price for a sentence that will be repeated a thousand times.
2. The four-member chain at locus 5. Arabic rhymes it for free on the pronoun suffix; English has to buy each member with a word choice, and the four adjectives (طيب لطيف لذيذ عذب) sit close enough together in sense that the rhyme kept pulling them into synonyms. Two of four, and the loss recorded.
3. D47. The temptation was to keep divan on principle and let the reader work it out. The reason not to is that the reader will not work it out — they will see a sofa — and T14 exists to stop an English word from replacing a foreign institution, not to license a foreign word that English has already reassigned.

Translator's log — span E

Written at translation time, 2026-08-16. Frozen before the comparators were opened for this span and before the study limb was designed. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims; any evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only. Span E takes D56–D69.

The governing decision of this span

D56 — the copy-text marks its night boundaries two different ways, and never both at once; the English follows it exactly, defect and all. This span contains three night boundaries and the copy-text marks each of them differently:

The second row is the one that decides. At the seam between the second old man's tale and the third, the copy-text prints a night heading with no dawn formula before it — the narrator does not break off, the sister does not speak, the King does not go to court. Strip the heading and there is no seam in the prose at all. At the third row the reverse: the formula and the whole frame passage are printed and no heading follows them, so a reader watching for headings sees no boundary and a reader watching for the formula sees one.

The rule, and it is V10's rule extended from tales to nights: the English marks a night where the copy-text marks a night, by the means the copy-text uses, and supplies nothing. So this translation carries a heading with no formula at one seam and a formula with no heading at the next. It is tempting to regularise — to supply the missing formula from the twenty other places it appears, which would cost nothing and would make the English tidier than its source. That is precisely the reason not to: a work whose signature device is an invariant sentence is a work in which where the sentence is not printed is data, and an English that prints it everywhere destroys the evidence.

The disagreement with witness 2 is recorded in ../collation.md §9 and is not resolved here. Witness 2 puts one boundary where the copy-text has none (after the third old man's tale, matching the copy-text's formula on p. 28) and has no boundary where the copy-text puts its heading (p. 27). On witness 2's reckoning this span is the second night whole; on the copy-text's it is the second night and the third. Both witnesses reach "night 4" at the same sentence, which is why this is a misplacement and not a divergence in the count.

The formulae, and what varies in them

D57 — V13's opening formula is extended once and truncated once, and both are followed. The copy-text writes it three times in this span and not twice the same way:

The extension ذو الرأي الرشيد rhymes with the vocative it extends (al-saʿīd / al-rashīd), which is the ordinary way this formula grows. Candidates: of counsel deliberate (rhymes on fortunate, but رشيد is rightly-guided, not unhurried); of right judgment (sense exact, rhyme gone); taken: of right reckoning, where the rhyme relocates to an unstressed echo on King — S2 permits the move and S1 requires the verdict, which is partial, not carried.

D58 — the sister's four-member chain varies again, and the English varies with it. Span D had ما أطيب حديثك، وألطفه وألذه وأعذبه; this span has ما أحلى حديثك وأطيبه، وألذه وأعذبه. One member is replaced and the order shifts. V14 binds the English to repeat where the copy-text repeats, and its converse binds here: where the copy-text substitutes a word, the English substitutes a word. Span D's mapping is frozen (أطيب pleasing, ألطف gracious, ألذ delicious, أعذب sweet), so أحلى — new here — takes a word span D did not use: honeyed. The chain therefore reads how honeyed … how pleasing … how delicious … how sweet, and a reader comparing the two nights sees exactly the one substitution the Arabic made.

D59 — V12 is printed for the second time in the work, unchanged, and the decision was to change nothing. The register's open question 9 asks whether the compensating figure (broke upon / broke off) wears under repetition. Two printings is not an answer to that question and this log does not claim one; what is recorded is that the second printing was written without reopening the first, which is what R05 §2 requires and what keeps the question answerable later.

Lexis and register

D60 — إحسان and معروف are a doublet three times over, and the proverb ties them to a third word. هل عندك إحسان ومعروف … إن عندي الإحسان والمعروف … ممَّن يُصنَع معه المعروف والإحسان — twice in one order and once reversed — and forty lines later the proverb يا محسنًا لمَن أساء puts the first root in a vocative against its own opposite. Rendering إحسان as charity would break the tie to the proverb. Taken: إحسان → good (as a thing one has and does), معروف → kindness, so the proverb reads You who do good to him who did ill, what he did is enough for the ill-doer and the حسن / سوء opposition survives with it. T7 keeps all three doublets as doublets, reversal included.

D61 — the feminine of a name kept in T10 is kept too: عفريتة → ifritah, جنية → jinniyah. T10's principle is that جني and عفريت are two words for one being and are never regularised; the wife of this tale is called by both, in the feminine, four lines apart. She-ifrit is plainer English and was refused for one reason: it would make the feminine a modification of the English word rather than of the Arabic one, and the text's point is that she was always the other thing.

D62 — الشيخ stays old man (T16) even where he is addressing a king.* The third old man's vocative to the ifrit is أيها السلطان ورئيس الجان — sulṭān / jān, an end-rhyme, and it recurs twelve lines later as أيها السلطان ورئيس ملوك الجان. Taken: O Sultan and chieftain of the jinn, where Sultan and chieftain* rhyme on their unstressed final syllables. Coded partial: the Arabic rhymes two stressed long vowels and the English rhymes two weak syllables, which is a different order of audibility. سلطان keeps its name under T14 — an office that is not an English office — and the second occurrence takes the same words with of the kings of restored, per V14.

D63 — مباح is the closing formula's word and it turns up in a sentence about a woman's life. فدمُها لك مباح — her blood is allowed you — is the same participle as الكلام المباح, the talk that was allowed, thirty lines later. The English uses the same word in both places. V14's rule is about repetition across a seam; this is repetition across a register, from a formula of narration into a sentence of licence to kill, and the copy-text does not soften it.

D64 — six cognate figures, six carried, and one of them is carriable only because English happens to have the pair. New wordings: فرحت غاية الفرح → rejoiced the utmost rejoicing; فرشت لها فرشًا حسنًا → spread her a fine spreading; مَن فعل بهما هذا الفعل → who did this deed to them, where English's own do / deed is a genuine cognate pair and no calque is needed. Recurrences taking wordings already fixed: تعجَّبْتُ … غاية العجب and تعجَّبَ الجني غايةَ العجب (both marvelled … the utmost marvelling, the span-D wording) and أحبها قلبي محبة عظيمة (loved her a great loving, the span-C wording). T13 stands at twenty-two instances over five spans, twenty-two carried. Excluded as not the figure: سافرتُ … قضيت سفري, where the verbal noun is the object of a different verb, and يتعجَّب من … الكلام العجيب, which is root-echo across a genitive and not a cognate object.

D65 — خلَّصك وخلص حقك keeps its repetition. set you free and set your right free. The Arabic uses one verb twice on two objects, one concrete and one abstract, and the English does the same thing at the same cost in idiom.

D66 — وما صدقت بطلوع الصباح is calqued, under V7. It is a full clause, so V7 sends it to calque rather than to sense: I could not credit the coming up of the morning. The idiom means I could hardly wait for daybreak, and that rendering was refused — it is the reading, not the sentence, and V7 exists because a clause gives an English reader a subject and a verb and so reads as figure.

D67 — احتبك الديوان → the court was knit up. The verb is from weaving. Span D's frame passage had no equivalent — the court simply convened — and this night's frame passage is longer by two verbs (ونهى وأمَرَ, and forbade and commanded). The frame passage is not a fixed formula in this copy-text, and the English does not make it one.

Two copy-text irregularities carried as they stand

Both were found in the collation against witness 2 (../collation.md §9), which was run after this span's English was written and before this log was frozen. Neither changed a word of the English: R05 §2 makes a copy-text irregularity something to record, not something to repair.

D68 — يا سيديي ملوك الجان (p. 23) is not a well-formed vocative and is left as it stands. The copy-text prints سيديي, which is neither the singular سيدي nor the dual سيدَيَّ as it would normally be written. Rendered My lord of the kings of the jinn, on the singular reading, because every other vocative in this scene is singular and addressed to one ifrit. Witness 2 reads يا سيد ملوك الجان — the plain construct, and the reading the sense wants — and one witness is not an emendation.

D69 — the copy-text gives the third old man a third of the blood in a sentence that has just called it the rest, and the English carries the contradiction. He asks for باقي دمه وجنايته — what is left of his blood and his crime — the jinni agrees, and eleven lines later the copy-text says the jinni وهب له ثلث دمه, made him a gift of a third of his blood; then the recap on the next page reverts to باقي جنايته, what is left of his crime. Three old men each granted a third exhausts the debt, so the rest is right and a third is the slip. Witness 2 reads باقي دمه at the disputed place — the second time in five spans that witness 2 may hold the sounder reading (../collation.md §9 row 2; the first was D28). Rendered as the copy-text has it, and flagged.

What was hard, in order

1. D56. The temptation to supply the missing dawn formula at the p. 27 seam was strong and had a good argument behind it — every other night in the work has one, so its absence looks like an accident of the edition rather than a fact about the text. It was refused because the study limb attached to this span asks what a reader can find in the English, and an English that tidies the source's silences answers that question about the translator instead of about the work.
2. The second old man's tale is 700 words of plain narrative sequence with almost nothing in it to decide, and that is its own difficulty: the parataxis (V3) has to hold across sentence after sentence of and I did, and he said, and we travelled, where English wants subordination badly and gets none. The only real choices in the whole tale are D60 and the two cognate figures.
3. D62. Two unstressed syllables are a poor exchange for two long vowels, and Sultan / chieftain was very nearly coded lost. What kept it at partial is that the pair is audible when the sentence is read aloud, which is the only test this project has for a figure of sound.

Translator's log — span F

Written at translation time. Frozen 2026-08-20 before either comparator was opened and before the study limb of this span existed. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims; any evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only. Span F takes D70–D84.

The governing decision of this span

D70 — the copy-text thins the seam between night 3 and night 4 on both sides, and the English carries the thinning. Every earlier night in this work closes with the dawn formula and a frame passage — Dunyazad's praise, the King's oath, the night in each other's arms, the court day — and opens with Dunyazad's request and Shahrazad's With love and honour before the It has come to me. At this seam the copy-text prints the dawn formula and nothing else at the foot of p. 32, and on p. 33, after the heading, goes straight to قالت: بلغني with no Dunyazad and no With love and honour. V15 says the English marks a night by the means the copy-text uses and supplies nothing; here that means the English seam is two lines where the last one was fourteen. The temptation to supply the missing frame is the exact temptation V15 exists to refuse.

This settles the register's open question 10, and it settles it the other way from an edition's slip. Four boundaries have now been rendered and each is marked differently:

A single irregular pair is an edition's slip. Three boundaries marked three ways, one of them with the heading displaced a page ahead of the formula and one with the frame passage simply absent, is a property of what is being printed, and D56's reading of it is confirmed rather than merely carried. The English now carries three different seams because the copy-text has three.

One thing the copy-text does rank consistently, and it is worth recording because it runs against the modern habit: the night heading gets a fresh page, display type, and neither running head nor folio; the tale heading حكاية الصياد مع العفريت gets a bold line in the middle of a page. The night is the primary division of this book and the tale is subordinate to it — the reverse of every English selection that prints the tales as stories with the nights as an ornament. The English heading levels follow the copy-text: ### for the night, #### for the tale.

Figures of sound in span F, and the split this span turned up

Fifteen rhyme loci were tabulated from the Arabic before any English existed for them, and are frozen here. S1 governs: attempt an English rhyme, take it only where the sense survives, record the loss where it does not. S5 governs partial.

Fifteen loci; seven carried, one partial, seven lost. The interesting thing is not the total but where the two halves fall:

• In quoted verse, six of seven rhyme positions carried (F1, F2, F4, F5, F6, F7; only F3 lost).
• In rhymed prose, one of seven carried (F11; F8 partial; F9, F10, F12, F13, F14 lost).

Across spans A–F the verse figure is now twenty-two of twenty-three rhyme positions carried (span B fourteen of fourteen, span C two of two, span F six of seven); the prose figure has never been near it. And the explanation is visible from the desk rather than inferred: S3 lets a line of English verse be reshaped around its rhyme-word, because a bayt has no obligation to keep its clauses in order; a prose catalogue has no such slack, because the rhyme in this work's prose falls on the names of things. المداري is a winnowing-fork and الصواري are ships' masts, and they are in the sentence together because they rhyme — there is no other reason to compare an ifrit's arms to a winnowing-fork and his legs to a mast in the same breath. To rhyme them in English I must rename them; to name them I must lose the rhyme. That is not a difficulty, it is a structure, and it is what the study limb of this span was built to test on the published record.

The three rhymes refused, named here so the refusal is on the record and not merely implied (D43's procedure):

• F9: arms like flails and legs like sails — a true rhyme, and both objects wrong. A مِدْرَى is a winnowing-fork, not a flail; a سارية is a mast, not a sail. Refused under S1.
• F10: a mouth like a cave and teeth like a grave — a true rhyme bought by replacing stones with a grave, which puts a burial in a sentence that has not got one. Refused under S1.
• F13: do I deal fair and you answer foul-play there — refused as padding; the alliterative antithesis a fair thing / a foul one is supplied at the same seam instead, and the rhyme is recorded lost, on V12's model.

D71 — F8 is the one place in this span where a sound was taken at a price, and the price is written down. His head among the clouds and his feet among the clods: تراب is dust, and clods are lumps of earth. The pararhyme clouds / clods is not a rhyme and is coded partial under S5; the denotation moves by the width of dust to clods. The alternative was his head in the clouds and his feet in the dust, with no figure at all. The choice is recorded rather than defended, and it is the smallest instance in the span of exactly the trade the study limb measures.

Lexis and register

D72 — قمقم → flask, and cucurbit is excluded by name. A قمقم is a narrow-necked metal vessel. The lead knows cucurbit from Burton and has not opened Burton for this span; declaring and refusing it is the same procedure D43 used for Burton's rhyme. Bottle was refused because قارورة — glass bottles — occurs eleven lines earlier in the same span and must stay distinct; jar was refused because زير takes it.

D73 — the vessel series is kept apart, one English word to one Arabic word, and it is now six deep: زير → water-jar (a large earthenware store-jar), قمقم → flask, قارورة → glass bottle, إبريق → ewer, كوز → jug (span E), صندوق → box and علبة → case (T12). Six vessels in one work is not incidental — the copy-text distinguishes them and so does the English, at the cost that nostrils like an ewer is as odd in English as مناخير كالإبريق is in Arabic. The oddity is the source's and is left standing.

D74 — مارد → marid, a third word for one being, joining T10's جني / عفريت. Within eight lines of p. 30 the copy-text calls the same creature عفريت, مارد and جني. T10 refused to regularise two words; three is the same refusal.

D75 — على رغم أنفي → with my nose in the dust, not in spite of my nose. V7 keeps a calque where the source gives a legible image. The trouble is that English in spite of is this calque, worn smooth: a reader meets in spite of my nose as an error, not as a figure. The Arabic image — رغم is the nose forced into the dirt — is restored by naming the dirt. This is the first place in the work where the calque had to be rebuilt because English had already absorbed it, and it is a different failure from V11's (no English resource) and from V7's (a bare abstract).

D76 — ثلاث حاجات → three needs, and three wishes is refused by name. حاجة is already fixed in this translation — he had done his need of the vizier's daughter, span E — and three wishes is an English fairy-tale formula that would import a genre the Arabic has not got. The ifrit is offering to discharge three requirements, not to grant wishes.

D77 — يا بعيد → you doomed thing. The vocative is a curse: بَعِدَ is to perish, and بُعْدًا له is away with him. You far one is opaque in English and you outcast supplies a social position the Arabic has not got. The image of distance is lost and the curse is kept; V6 wants the abuse to stay abuse.

D78 — شيخ العفاريت → elder of the ifrits, extending T16. T16 fixed شيخ → old man on the ground that the three شيوخ of the merchant's tale hold no office. Here the word marks rank, and the fisherman is flattering; elder takes the rank without taking sheikh, which T16 refused. قيّم العفاريت, twelve lines earlier, is warden of the ifrits — a different word and a different English word.

D79 — الجن المارقين → the renegade jinn. مارق is the participle used of those who shot out of the community; rebel was the alternative and was refused as too political and too calm.

D80 — أم عامر is not glossed, and the loss is recorded. The kunya means the hyena, and the proverb's whole point is the man who sheltered a hyena and was eaten by it. An English reader gets a name and no story. The man who sheltered the hyena was live and was refused: the copy-text does not gloss it either, and V10's principle — supply nothing the copy-text does not supply — governs a riddle as much as a heading. Recorded as a standing loss, not solved, on V11's model. This is the second standing loss of the work.

D81 — مناخير is a colloquial plural and the English does not mark it. V11's standing loss, second instance: every English resource for marking a low register is regional. The word sits in the most elevated set-piece in the span, which is itself worth recording — the copy-text's grandest description reaches for a street word in the middle of it.

D82 — أشرَّ القتلات takes T13's fixed wording and the elative is not marked. Span A fixed شرَّ قتلة → the foulest of killings; the copy-text has escalated to the elative with a broken plural, and the English writes the foulest of all killings, which marks the plural and not the elative. T13 is now twenty-six instances over six spans, twenty-six carried — with أي موتة تموتها (what death will you die), أي قتلة تُقتَلها (what killing will you be killed) and غضبت غضبًا شديدًا (I was angry a mighty anger) all in this span.

The copy-text irregularities carried as they stand

D83 — the copy-text does not repeat itself across this seam, and neither does the English. V14 binds the English to repeat exactly where the copy-text repeats. Here the copy-text paraphrases: night 3 closes on لا أصدِّق أبدًا حتى أنظرك فيه بعيني and night 4 resumes with لا أصدِّقك أبدًا حتى أنظرك بعيني في القمقم — an object pronoun added, and فيه expanded to في القمقم and moved to the end. V16 is the converse rule and it governs: the English closes until I see you in it with my own eye and resumes until I see you with my own eye in the flask. This is the first counter-instance to V14 in the work, and it is evidence rather than a defect: a copy-text that repeats its formulae letter for letter eight times (RS-20260815f) and paraphrases this sentence is distinguishing a formula from a recapitulation.

D84 — p. 30 is a full-page colour plate and the English says nothing about it. The page carries an illustration of the ifrit rising from the flask, a caption quoting the text, and five lines of text below. The plate is why Wikisource has never transcribed the page. The caption is a quotation, not new text, and is not translated; the five lines are, and are the fisherman's exchange with the marid. Recorded in ../collation.md §9 with the reading conditions, because a copy-text read from a page image at 500px is a weaker witness than one read from a proofread transcription and the difference should be visible to anyone using this span.

What was hard, in order

1. F9 and F10. Two rhymes lying open — flails / sails, cave / grave — and both of them bought by renaming the thing described. Refusing them twice in one sentence is the span's governing craft decision and the reason the study limb exists.
2. قمقم. Six vessels in one work, and the word most readers know it by is Burton's.
3. على رغم أنفي. An idiom English has already swallowed, so the calque reads as a mistake.
4. أم عامر. A line whose sense is entirely in a name, and a rule that forbids supplying it.
5. The seam. Two lines where the last seam was fourteen, and a strong pull to write the missing frame passage because the reader will feel the gap. V15 exists for precisely this pull.

Translator's log — span G

Written at translation time. Frozen 2026-08-21, before either comparator was opened for this span and before any English of it existed. The study limb E-20260821c was designed first, from the Arabic alone, and its locus table was frozen at 90a6428 before a word of this span was translated — so the translator worked knowing which fifteen places would be counted, and that is declared here rather than hidden. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims; any evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only. Numbering is cumulative (R05 §3): span G takes D85–D101.

The contamination this span incurred, declared before anything else

Five lines of Burton's rendering of this very span were seen before it was translated, and that has never happened in this arm before. While establishing that the stored Burton file contains the tale, grep -n -i "Douban\|Yunan" printed five matching lines to the terminal:

1. Yunan with the sage Duban."[FN#77] "And who was the Wazir of King Yunan
2. a King called Yunan reigned over the city of Fars of the land of the
3. Yunan, he kissed the ground before him: then he prayed for the
4. anoint thee with ointment." Now when King Yunan heard his words he said
5. Thereupon King Yunan took the bat from the Sage and grasped it firmly;

Nothing else of Burton and nothing at all of Lane was opened. What those five lines carry:

• His name for صولجان — bat. Refused by name in D86, on the same footing as cucurbit at span F (D72, erratum E8).
• His name for the sage — Duban. The copy-text does not read دوبان; it reads رويان, and so does witness 2. D85 follows the copy-text, and the received English name is refused by name.
• kissed the ground before him and anoint thee with ointment. These are the obvious English for قبَّل الأرض and أدهنك بدهن and the lead would have written them anyway; before him is not taken, because the copy-text has بين يدَيْه and V7 calques it as between his hands, and the archaising thee is refused by V1. Declared, not claimed harmless.
• The line "a King called Yunan reigned over the city of Fars of the land of the —" cuts off before the second half of L2's rhyme chain. It does show that Burton keeps Fars where this translation writes the Persians.

This is why the study limb's primary excludes the lead (E-20260821c §2), and it is now excluded on two independent grounds rather than one: the lead is hypothesis-aware, and the lead has seen five lines of one comparator.

The governing decision of this span

D85 — the sage is Ruyan, not Douban, because the copy-text says so. الحكيم رويان. Every English Nights the lead has ever seen calls him Doobán (Lane) or Douban (Burton), from the Būlāq and Calcutta II reading دوبان; the received name is so fixed that the Tale of King Yunan and the Sage Douban is how the story is indexed in English. Hindawi 2022 reads رويان at all ten of its occurrences in this span and دوبان at none; the second Arabic witness reads رويان at all eleven of its own and دوبان at none. Two unrelated Arabic digitisations agree against the whole English tradition, so this is a recension difference, not an edition's slip, and T1's rule — names without diacritics, from the copy-text — decides it. Ruyan.

What the decision costs and what it buys. It costs an English reader the only handle they have on this tale: a reader who knows the story will not recognise it by its title. It buys the thing the arm exists to record — that the copy-text's own reading is what gets translated, and that where the tradition and the copy-text differ, the difference is visible on the page rather than smoothed away. And it buys one datum the study limb could not otherwise have had: L9's rhyme, يونان / رويان, survives in English under either reading — Yunan / Ruyan chime, and so do Yunan / Duban. The rhyme does not care which recension a translator used, because it does not go through the translator at all.

Figures of sound in span G

S1 binds: attempt an English rhyme at every rhymed locus, take it only where the sense survives, record the loss where it does not. Fifteen loci, tabulated from the Arabic in E-20260821c §4 before this English existed. The verdicts:

Two carried, four partial, nine lost of fifteen — a better rate than any prose span of this arm so far, and D93 says why, without claiming it as evidence for anything: the study limb was designed to answer that question with hands that are not the lead's.

D90 — the dawn formula, and what a three-member chain costs. فلما أصبح الصباح وأضاء بنوره ولاح، وسلمت الشمس على زين الملاح. Three cola on -āḥ, and it is a set-piece: the copy-text uses it to raise the register at the sage's entrance, exactly as it uses the night formulae at a seam. Candidates written down before one was taken:

Witness 2 has none of this clause — it reads فلما أصبح الصباح لبس أفخر ثيابه, straight from the first colon to the dressing. The densest saj' in the span is absent from the second witness, and the collation records it beside the earlier instances of the same pattern — witness 2 thinning a rhymed chain the copy-text has (../collation.md §7 rows 1–2, §12).

D91 — the five languages, and a near-run refused because one member would have had to lie. الكتب اليونانية والفارسية والرومية والعربية والسريانية rhymes five deep on the adjectival suffix -iyya. English has a suffix that would do it: Grecian, Persian, Roman, Arabian, Syrian — four of five on -ian. Refused. العربية here modifies books: they are books in Arabic, and Arabian books are books of Arabia. One member of a five-member chain would have had to change what it means for the other four to chime, and S1 allows the rhyme only where the sense survives. Set plain: the Greek books and the Persian and the Roman and the Arabic and the Syriac.

D92 — where two register rules collide, the lexical binding wins, and the rhyme is the one that gives way. ففرح بذلك غاية الفرح، واتسع صدره وانشرح (L10). A clean English rhyme was available: he took the utmost delight in it, and his breast grew wide and was light. Refused, because فرح غاية الفرح is a cognate figure and T13 binds it — rejoiced the utmost rejoicing, and the register's standing tally is sixteen instances and sixteen carried — and took the utmost delight would have broken the figure to buy the rhyme. T13 is a binding on a word; S1 is an attempt. This is the first time in seven spans the two have wanted different English, and the priority is written down here so it is not re-decided: T13 outranks S1. Register: V18.

D93 — the one locus that carried outright, and it carried because English had already done the work. من لم ينظر في العواقب فما الدهر له بصاحب → He who does not look to the ends, Time is none of his friends. The Arabic rhymes al-ʿawāqib / bi-ṣāḥib; the plain English words for those two things — ends and friends — rhyme in English before any translator touches them. Nothing was bent to get it: ends is what العواقب means in a proverb about consequences, and friend is what صاحب means. The translator's contribution here was to not get in the way. Whether that is the general rule is exactly what E-20260821c was frozen to ask, and this log makes no claim about it.

D89 — the poem: five abyāt, monorhyme on -ain, and taṣrīʿ at the first. The Arabic runs on -abā (أبا · غياهبا · مقطبا · الربا · مآربا) and the first bayt has taṣrīʿ — its first hemistich ends on the rhyme too. S3 sets it as verse, one English line per hemistich, monorhyme at the bayt-ends; open question 7, discharged at span F, says attempt the taṣrīʿ. Five rhyme positions, five carried, plus the taṣrīʿ: six of six. Two members were paid for in sense and are named: مقطبا is frowning and became in disdain, which is a frown of displeasure rather than of care; and the second half of bayt 1 is elliptical in Arabic — and if one day it calls another its father — where the English supplies the censure the Arabic leaves hanging, it calls in vain. الربا is the high ground and is kept (what clouds do with the hills, in rain).

Lexis and register

D86 — صولجان → mallet, and bat is refused by name. The word is the curved stick of the Persian ball game; the copy-text pairs it with الكرة throughout. Polo-stick imports a word the Arabic has not got and a sport an English reader would date to the Raj; bat is Burton's, seen this session in the terminal (declared above) and therefore unavailable; club reads as a weapon in a sentence about a sick king. Mallet. قصبة — the hollow shaft the sage packs the drug into — is shaft, kept apart from the mallet itself, because the whole cure turns on the drug being in the handle and coming out through the palm. Register: T29.

D87 — خلعة → robe of honour, and خلع عليه → bestowed a robe of honour on him. The word is an institution, not a garment: a ruler's investiture-gift, and the copy-text uses it four times in this span at rising sizes — one robe, the high robes, five robes. English robe alone loses the act; honoured him with a robe makes the King's gift a compliment. T14's principle would keep the Arabic word, but خلعة has no English currency at all, unlike vizier or qadi, so it is translated. Register: T30.

D88 — سمعًا وطاعة takes T5's English, unchanged. The copy-text has بالسمع والطاعة twice in span A and the bare accusative سمعًا وطاعة here. The difference is grammatical, not lexical — the same two nouns in a different case — and V7's principle (a rule about grammar is not a rule about policy) says the English does not vary: To hear is to obey.

D94 — احتبك الديوان → the court was knit up. The verb is from weaving: the court closed up, became a full and tight assembly. The court was crowded loses the making; the court convened is an English officialese the copy-text's Middle Arabic has no register for. The calque is kept under V7, which allows a calque where the source gives a full clause.

D99 — ولد زنا → a son of adultery. V5 and V6 bind: crude terms are rendered crudely, matched and not exceeded. Bastard exceeds — it is an English insult, where the Arabic is the vizier's oath about himself. Son of adultery is what he says.

D100 — مجبول على الحسد والمقت → kneaded upon envy and hatred. جُبل على is to be moulded or kneaded out of something, as clay. A full clause, so V7 calques it. Made of envy would be the English idiom and would drop the potter.

D101 — the sage says بلغني, and it is the night-formula's own verb. بلغني ما اعتراك — it has come to me what has come upon you. V13 fixed بلغني as it has come to me for Shahrazad's opening formula, and the copy-text puts the same verb in the sage's mouth eleven lines into his first speech. The English repeats it, under V14: where the copy-text repeats a word across a seam between frame and tale, so does the English. A reader of the English can see that the sage opens his own account the way Shahrazad opens hers, which is a thing this tale is doing on purpose — it is the first tale in the work told by a character to save his own life.

D97 — the court's furniture. الأمراء emirs, joining T3/T14's rule that an office which is not an English office keeps its name; الحُجَّاب chamberlains, which is an English office and takes its English name; أرباب الدولة the lords of the state; الميدان the field, not the maidan and not the hippodrome; الجوامك والجرايات salaries and allowances, two words for a stipend kept as two.

The copy-text irregularity carried as it stands

D95 — the fourth night ends in the middle of a sentence, and the English ends in the middle of a sentence. The copy-text prints ثم قال الملك يونان: ذكر والله أعلم … — the King begins the formula that opens a tale, ذُكِر والله أعلم (it is related, and God is more knowing), and the page breaks off on an ellipsis before the tale starts, and then the night formula falls. Every other night in this work so far has closed on a completed clause. V15 binds: the English marks the night the way the copy-text marks it and supplies nothing, so the English breaks off too.

Witness 2 does not break off, and how it avoids doing so is the argument that the copy-text is right. It reads كما بلغني عن الملك يونان ذكر والله أعلم. — a complete sentence with a full stop. It gets there by losing السندباد and the words ثم قال الملك, so that عن الملك runs straight into يونان: the vizier is now said to envy as I have heard about King Yunan, who is the king he is talking to. The reading is nonsense, and the copy-text's السندباد is confirmed by the fifth night, which is the tale of King Sindbad and his falcon. A skip of the eye has made a smooth sentence out of a broken one, and the smooth one is wrong.

And the seam itself is the fullest in the work so far: heading, dawn formula, sister's reply, Shahrazad's answer, the King's private resolve, the day's business, the night. D70's table of boundary types gains a fourth entry — not a fourth kind of thinning, which is what open question 10 said a later span should watch for, but the complete form against which the three thinned ones are thin. Witness 2 marks this boundary in full as well, and with a heading of its own (وفي الليلة الرابعة).

What was hard, in order

1. L7, the dawn formula. Three cola, and English would give all three if the third member were allowed to lose its plural or the first its verb. Four candidates were written down before one was taken, and what was taken carries two members and no sense loss at all. The thing that made it hard is that the rhyme is available — twice over — and both times at a price S1 forbids.
2. D85, the sage's name. Following the copy-text against the entire English tradition is easy to write down and uncomfortable to do: it makes the translation unrecognisable at the one point where a reader might have recognised it. The check that settled it was the second witness.
3. D92, where T13 and S1 wanted different words. A clean rhyme was there and a standing rule took it away. Writing the priority down cost more than making the choice.
4. L4, the five languages. Four of five would have chimed on -ian and the fifth would have had to mean something else. Refusing a four-fifths solution is a different kind of decision from refusing an impossible one.
5. The poem's bayt 1. زهت الفصاحة إذ دعيت لها أبا / وإذا دعت يوما سواك لها أبا says its second half by not saying it. English will not hold an ellipsis of that shape in a rhymed couplet, so the censure had to be supplied.

Translator's log — span H

Written at translation time, before any English rendering of span H was opened and before the study limb's results existed. The study limb's design and locus table (E-20260823b) were frozen first, at 23e020fe, from the Arabic alone. Numbering is cumulative (R05 §3): span H takes D102–D118. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims; any evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only.

The governing decision of this span

D102 — three levels of telling, and nothing on the page to mark any of them. The fifth night holds the first tale-inside-a-tale-inside-a-tale in this work. Shahrazad tells Shahriyar; inside that, the fisherman tells the ifrit the Tale of King Yunan and the Sage Ruyan; inside that, King Yunan tells his vizier the Tale of King Sindbad and the Falcon, and the vizier tells King Yunan the tale of the vizier who contrived against a king's son; and inside that again, the sage names the Tale of the Crocodile and refuses to tell it.

The copy-text prints one heading in six pages, and it is a night's (فلما كانت الليلة ٥), not a tale's. There is no rule, no break, no indentation, no quotation mark and no supplied attribution at any of the five seams. V4 (speech unquoted) and V10 (no supplied heading at an embedded tale) were written at spans A and C, when the nesting went two deep; this is the first span where obeying them means asking an English reader to hold three levels at once with nothing typographic to hold them by. They are obeyed, and the decision is registered as one rather than taken silently.

What carries the structure instead is the source's own sentences, and they are of three kinds:

1. Entry and exit formulae, used unevenly. The falcon tale is entered by the full machinery — allusion (كما ندم الملك السندباد على قتل الباز), request (وكيف كان ذلك؟), and the impersonal opening ذُكِر أنه كان — and closed by a formula that names what it closes (هذا ما كان من حديث الملك السندباد). The ghoul tale has neither. The vizier slides out of a simile into narrative inside one sentence — كما هلك وزير كان احتال على ابن ملك من الملوك؛ كان لذلك الملك ولد مولع بالصيد والقنص — and climbs back out of it inside another: وانصرف ابن الملك إلى أبيه، وحدَّثَه بحديث الوزير، وأنت أيها الملك متى آمنت لهذا الحكيم قتلك أقبح القتلات. One و divides the end of the inner tale from the resumption of the outer one. V3 keeps the parataxis, so the English seam is exactly where the Arabic seam is and is exactly as abrupt: …and told him the story of the vizier, and you, O King, whenever you trust this sage…
2. The teller breaking into his own tale. Twice the fisherman — two levels out — addresses the ifrit from inside the story of Yunan: مثل ما قلت لك أيها العفريت, and, wedged between subject and subordinate clause, فلما تحقَّقَ الحكيم — أيها العفريت — أن الملك قاتِلَه لا محالةَ. The copy-text prints the second clause twice, once without the vocative and once with it, so the two English sentences differ by exactly the two words — ifrit —. Nothing was smoothed.
3. One sentence repeated across the levels, which is D107.

Nothing was supplied at any of the five seams. No continued the fisherman, no said the vizier to the king, no heading, no break. Where the English is hard to follow, it is hard to follow in the place the Arabic is.

The sentence the embedding is built on

D107 — أبقني يُبْقِك الله ولا تقتلني يقتلك الله is one English sentence at every level, and the verb أبقى is one English verb wherever it stands. The fisherman said it to the ifrit at night 4 (span G, rendered Spare me and God will spare you, and do not kill me or God will kill you); Ruyan says it to Yunan four times here; and the fisherman's closing sentence turns it back on the ifrit in the third person and then the second (لو أبقى الحكيم رويان لأبقاه الله … لو أبقيتني لَأبقاك الله). The fisherman is telling this story only because that sentence recurs: he is showing the ifrit what happens to someone who hears it and refuses. If the English varies the wording between the levels, the reason for the nesting is not on the page at all.

So V14's rule — where the copy-text repeats wording across a seam, the English repeats it exactly — is applied here across three levels rather than two, and the same English verb spare is used at each of the six places, including Shahrazad's own إنْ عشتُ وأبقاني الملك (if I live and the King spares me), which D43 had already fixed. The copy-text's own spelling varies (يُبْقِيك once, يُبْقِك three times); that is orthography, not wording, and the English does not vary with it.

D108 — لا محالة → past all escape, invariant, all three occurrences. Two of them are inside the twice-printed clause of D102; the third is the King's own if I spare him I am a dead man past all escape. Keeping it invariant is what makes the intrusion at the second printing visible as an intrusion.

Figures of sound in span H

Seven loci, tabulated from the Arabic before any English for them existed. S1 governs: attempt, take only where the sense survives, record the loss.

Three carried of seven, and the three tell three different stories.

• Locus 1 was taken by a pair the Arabic does not have: مليح and قبيح are unrelated roots, and grace / disgrace are one word and its compound. The rhyme is exact and the morphology is wrong, and that is recorded rather than hidden. Alternatives refused: the fair with the foul (alliteration, no rhyme), the comely with the homely and the handsome with the loathsome (both rhyme only on an unstressed syllable, which S5 codes partial).
• Locus 2 is carried by two Arabic loanwords that happen to rhyme in English. Emirs and viziers both end -eers; T3 and T32 had already fixed both words, at span A and span G, for reasons that had nothing to do with sound. Nothing was chosen here.
• Locus 3 is S4 behaving exactly as S4 says it should: five Arabic verbs carrying one object suffix -hā, five English verbs carrying one object pronoun her. The rhyme is grammatical in both languages and crosses for free.
• Loci 4, 6 and 7 were all lost to terms frozen in earlier spans, and that is the finding. Locus 4 is the second collision V18 governs: T13 binds غاية العجب to the utmost marvelling, and no English rhyme for delight was reachable behind it. Locus 6 is T32's chamberlains; locus 7 is T17's the court, chosen at span D because divan now means furniture. Three of the four losses are the price of consistency, paid at a locus that was decided before the locus existed — which is the standing cost of a binding register, and the first span in which it can be counted.
• Locus 5's loss was fixed at span G, where الأطباء والحكماء was first rendered.

One sentence carries three rhymed pairs and the English carries one of them. وطلعت الأمراء والوزراء والحُجَّاب والنوَّاب وأرباب الدولة جميعًا، وصار الديوان كزهر البستان is the densest saj' in the span: أمراء/وزراء, حجاب/نواب, ديوان/بستان. The English rhymes on the first pair by accident and on neither of the others by rule.

Polyptoton, which T13's principle covers and which cost nothing: واغدر به قبل أن يغدر بك → betray him before he betrays you, and the sentence following it keeps the tie by rendering الغدار as this betrayer; لو أبقى … لأبقاه الله، وطلب قتله فقتله الله → had spared … would have spared him … sought his killing, and God killed him. T13's cognate figure gains three instances — أقبح القتلات (the ugliest of killings), تجازيني مجازاة التمساح (requite me the requital of the crocodile), بكى بكاءً شديدًا (wept a hard weeping) — and a fourth if خاص الخاص (the choice of the choice) is counted, which it is. T13 was last counted at D53: sixteen instances over four spans, sixteen carried. It is not recounted for spans E–G here, so no running total is restated; these four are added to the register's entry as four.

D106 — أقبح القتلات takes an English adjective no earlier span used. V16 fires: span A fixed شرَّ قتلة as the foulest of killings, so أقبح is the ugliest, and a reader comparing the two places sees the substitution the Arabic made.

The verse

Eight poems, twenty-one abyāt, twenty-four rhyme positions — the largest verse load of the arm, larger than spans B and F together. S3 sets each as verse, one English line to one Arabic hemistich, monorhyme at the bayt-ends and at the first hemistich where the source has taṣrīʿ.

D112 — twenty-four of twenty-four rhyme positions carried; eight paid for in sense. The tally, by poem, with the English rhyme family:

taṣrīʿ stands at eight instances over three spans, eight carried, one paid for (span B's poem 1, D18). Open question 7 was discharged at span F on five instances; three more do not disturb it.

What the eight were paid with, said plainly: poem 1's planned for قدَّرَ (decreed); poem 2's of my own (filler) and its among men and when I am alone for في السر والجهر (in secret and openly), which trades concealment for company; poem 3's as you will see (added); poem 5's a bliss that never dies for نعيم دائم (a lasting bliss), a positive turned negative; poem 7's and let every tongue do the same for بكل لسان; poem 8's bane for المحن (trials), and its of the age let no man complain for فلا عتب على الزمن, a statement turned imperative.

D113 — poem 3's word broken across the hemistich is carried broken. The copy-text sets اللهُ يَفْعَلُ مَا يَشَا | ءُ فَلَا تَكُنْ مُعْتَرِضَا — the word يشاء split at the caesura, three letters ending one hemistich and one beginning the next. The English does the same: God does the thing that He plea- / ses. It is ugly in both languages and it is the same ugliness.

D110 — poem 4's pun on the sage's own title is kept and its tajnīs is lost. سَلِّمْ أُمُورَكَ لِلْحَكِيمِ الْعَالِمِ tells the King to commit his affairs to al-Ḥakīm — and the man reciting it is الحكيم رويان, the sage Ruyan, whom the King is about to kill. The English writes Give over your affairs to the Sage, the One who understands, which reads oddly as a divine title and keeps the irony, because T- terms hold across a page and the reader can see the two uses. The paronomasia in the same line — العالِم (the Knowing) against العالَم (the world), one consonantal skeleton and two words — is lost, and no English pair was found that means both. Understands / demands takes the rhyme and gives up the pun.

Lexis and register

D103 — غولة → ghoulah, extending T20. T20 keeps the feminine of a being-name in the Arabic feminine (عفريتة → ifritah, جنية → jinniyah), and this is the same case. Ghoul alone was refused for a second reason as well: the English word is a real descendant of غول, but its meaning has narrowed to the graveyard, and T17's clause — unless the English form of that name has been taken over by something else — applies to it as it applied to divan.

D104 — جارية stays slave-girl (T2), and the collision is written down rather than resolved in the English. The woman at the head of the road is جارية in the copy-text and says in her next breath that she is بنت ملك من ملوك الهند. In this work جارية has so far stood beside عبد and سرية and meant a piece of property (T2, T18); in Middle Arabic generally it can mean no more than young woman. Two readings were live:

• Render girl, on the ground that T2's warrant is the slave vocabulary of the frame tale and this is the word's other job. Cost: the English silently decides a question the Arabic leaves open, and the register stops binding the moment it is inconvenient.
• Render slave-girl, on the ground that the register binds. Cost: the English says something more definite than the Arabic does — and, as it happens, something useful, since a slave-girl alone on a road claiming to be an Indian king's daughter is exactly the thing the prince should not believe, and she is in fact a ghoulah.

The second was taken because a binding register that yields to the first hard case is not one. It is entered as register open question 12: if a later span uses جارية of a woman who cannot possibly be a slave, T2 needs an erratum, and this decision is the reason the erratum will be needed.

D105 — a morphological variant of one root is not a substitution, and the English does not vary. Two cases in this span. The copy-text writes باز once and بازي thirteen times of the same bird; and it writes الليلة القابلة where every earlier night has الليلة المقبلة. S6 settled this principle at span G for سمعًا وطاعة against بالسمع والطاعة — the difference is grammatical, not lexical, and the English does not vary. So the falcon is the falcon throughout, and Shahrazad promises the coming night as she always has. V16 does not fire on a form; it fires on a word, and the boundary is now stated. The second Arabic witness supports the reading from outside: it has بازي at every occurrence and المقبلة at this one, so the variation is the copy-text's own and not the tradition's (../collation.md §12).

D109 — the falcon tale's furniture. باز / بازي → falcon (D105); الوكيل على طير الصيد → the officer over the birds of the chase, an office with no English name and no Arabic currency, so T14's rule sends it to a description; طاسة → bowl (T24's vessel series is not extended, because this vessel is not one of that chain's members and no earlier span used bowl); دبوس → mace; قربوس السرج → the saddle-bow; ماء مثل السمن → water … like clarified butter, which is what the snake's venom looked like; قلب → topple, invariant, all four times the falcon knocks the bowl over. غزالة keeps her يديها as hands, not forelegs, under V7: the Arabic gives a full clause — she sets her hands on her breast as though she were kissing the ground to the King — and the point of the sentence is that a gazelle performs a courtier's obeisance.

D116 — خاص الخاص → the choice of the choice. T13's cognate figure in its superlative shape. The choicest of books would have said the sense and lost the figure.

D114 — the Tale of the Crocodile is asked for and refused, and nothing is supplied. مجازاة التمساح is named, the King asks for it in the same words he used to ask for the falcon (وما حكاية التمساح؟ against وكيف كان ذلك؟), and the sage says he cannot tell it in this state. The tale never comes, in this recension or in the second witness. No note, no bracket, no supplied explanation: an English reader gets what an Arabic reader gets, which is a door named and not opened.

D117 — the King's intimates keep their number shift. فقام بعض خواص الملك، وقال: أيها الملك، هَبْ لي دمَ هذا الحكيم؛ لأننا ما رأيناه… — some rise, one voice asks for the blood as me, and the reason is given as we. The English keeps all three.

The copy-text irregularities carried as they stand

D115. Four, and one of them is a fact about the printed book rather than about the text.

1. The falcon's wings are thrown down and then clipped. ثم ضرب البازي بالسيف، فرمى أجنحته — he strikes the falcon with the sword and throws down its wings — and eight lines later فندم الملك على قصِّ أجنحة البازي, he is sorry for the clipping of them. A sword-stroke and a clipping are not the same act, and the bird then gasps and dies. The English carries both words.
2. قبة البازي for the bowl's hanging-place. The bowl was معلَّقة في رقبته, at the falcon's neck; when the King takes it he takes it من قبة البازي. Read as the same place, and rendered from the falcon's neck; almost certainly رقبة with its first letter lost. Recorded, not emended.
3. فساروا جميعًا فنظرا — a plural verb and then a dual, of the same two riders, in one sentence. The English has no number on its verbs and cannot carry it; recorded here so the loss is not silent. This is the second span in which the copy-text's number-marking behaves like this (D56's dual/plural split at span E).
4. The vizier's answer is broken. وما الذي فعلته من الضرورة، ورأيتَ منه سوءًا؟ will not parse as it stands — and what is it that I have done out of necessity, and you have seen evil in it? — and the English is broken in the same place and in the same way.

And a fact about the printed page: the transcription of p. 38 carries the folio ٢٨, between pages foliated 37 and 39. Whether the misprint is the book's or the transcriber's was not checked against the page image, and nothing in the text depends on it. It is recorded because the arm has twice now found that an apparent gap in this copy-text was a fact about the printed object (p. 26 blank at span E, p. 30 a colour plate at span F), and this is the third.

The collation, and what it says about the copy-text

Full table in ../collation.md §12. 1,766 copy-text tokens against 1,656 in witness 2, similarity 0.9281, 73 non-identical spans. The substantive ones:

• Witness 2 has six of the eight poems. Poems 3 and 4 — the كن عن همومك معرضا quatrain and the سلم أمورك للحكيم العالم couplet, 81 tokens together — are simply not there. This is the largest single difference of the span and the largest verse loss of the arm.
• Witness 2 loses the falcon tale's ending. Thirteen tokens: the King's return to his first place, the gazelle thrown to the cook, and his sitting down. In witness 2 the gazelle he has flayed and hung at his saddle-bow disappears without being mentioned again.
• Witness 2 keeps every piece of the level-marking machinery. All four أيها العفريت, including the parenthetical intrusion at L7; the request formula, the closing formula, and the crocodile refusal. It drops one vocative — the أيها الوزير of the opening sentence — and one member of the ما رأيناه … وما رأيناه pair. Two unrelated Arabic digitisations agree about the intrusions and disagree about the poems, which says the level-marking is in the tradition and the verse is what editors and copyists lose.
• Witness 2 regularises where the copy-text varies: بازي at every occurrence, المقبلة for القابلة, يُبْقِيك for the copy-text's mixed يُبْقِيك / يُبْقِك. It also drops الملك before السندباد, which is V9's variable behaving as V9 says it does.
• One substantive variant changes who speaks. The copy-text has the severed head speak — فإن الرأس يكلِّمك ويجاوبك — and witness 2 puts both verbs in the feminine, تكلمك وتجاوبك, which attaches them to الصحيفة, the page on the left, and makes the book answer instead of the head. Recorded; the copy-text's reading is kept, and it is the one the tale's marvel needs.

What was hard, in order

1. The seam at L5. …and told him the story of the vizier, and you, O King, whenever you trust this sage… Every instinct of English prose says to put a paragraph break, a dash, or three words of attribution there. V10 and V3 say to put nothing. Writing the sentence and leaving it alone was the hardest single act of the span, and it is the one thing in it that the study limb can test against four other hands.
2. Twenty-four rhyme positions in one sitting. Poems 2 and 3 want five members of one family each — the same demand that ran English out at five in the Persian work the session before last (RS-20260823-run-depth). Both held here, and the reason they held is that both had a natural anchor at the end (though they weigh my back down; give over your affairs to the decree) which the rest could be built back from. Building forward from bayt 1 failed at both.
3. جارية. Written up as D104. The register won and the cost is real.
4. Poem 4's pun. More of this span's thinking went on العالِم / العالَم than on any other line in it, and it produced nothing. What was salvaged — the tie between the Sage of the verse and the sage Ruyan — was not the figure that was being looked for.
5. The two فلما تحقَّقَ الحكيم clauses. The temptation was to vary the second so it would not read as an error. V14 forbids it, and the whole point of the second printing is that it is the first one with two words pushed into it.

Translator's log — span I

Written at translation time, before any evaluation of this span was designed and before any English rendering of span I was opened. Numbering is cumulative (R05 §3): span I takes D119–D134. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims; any evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only.

The governing decision of this span

D119 — one English word for عهد, and the chain it makes. The sixth night prints the root ع-ه-د eight times in 880 words, and it prints them across three narrative levels and two kinds of discourse: the ifrit's oath (أعاهدك), the fisherman's taking of it (أخذ الصياد عليه العهد, بالأيمان والعهود), a quotation of the Qur'an about it (وَأَوْفُوا بِالْعَهْدِ إِنَّ الْعَهْدَ كَانَ مَسْئُولًا, twice in five words), the fisherman's reproach (عاهدتني), and — two scenes later, in a kitchen, spoken to four fish in a frying pan — هل أنت على العهد القديم مقيم. The chain is the night's spine: the ifrit breaks a covenant in the first third and the fish are asked about an older one in the last third, and the reader is meant to hear the same word both times.

So عهد is covenant at all eight occurrences, which is also what span D already printed for the doublet عهد وميثاق → covenant and bond (span D, the merchant's promise to come back to the ifrit). Span D is not revised and does not need to be: the word is the same word.

The objection, stated because it is a real one: the old covenant names the Old Testament in English. Every alternative that avoids it — compact, pact, pledge, word — breaks something else. Pledge is taken (رهون → pledges, span D); compact and pact are legal-register words that would make the Qur'anic verse read like a treaty clause; word cannot carry العهود plural. And the objection dissolves on inspection: العهد القديم is also the ordinary modern Arabic name of the Old Testament. The resonance is not an English import; it is a coincidence the two languages share, and a reader of the Arabic meets it too. Kept, with the fact recorded here rather than annotated in the text (V17's principle).

The work's first quotation of the Qur'an, and how the copy-text marks it

D120 — قال اللّٰه تعالى → God, be He exalted, has said, and the verse is set in italics. Eight spans and 8,000 Arabic words in, this is the first place the Nights quotes scripture in this copy-text. The copy-text marks it with a dedicated template, {{آية|…}}, which is a typographic distinction and nothing else — no attribution, no sura, no chapter-and-verse. That template is part of Hindawi's editorial layer, the same layer that shows through in the {{خطأ|ففقال|فقال}} correction inside span A (../collation.md §2); what the manuscript tradition did here is not knowable from this witness.

V15 says the English marks what the copy-text marks, by the means the copy-text uses, and supplies nothing. The means here is typographic, so the answer is typographic: italics, and no quotation marks, no citation, no note. V4 forbids quotation marks on speech and this is speech; a footnote would supply an apparatus the copy-text has not got. Rejected: naming the sura (Q 17:34) in the text, which would tell an English reader something the Arabic reader is not told either. The verse is rendered plainly and keeps العهد twice, so D119's chain runs through it: And fulfil the covenant; the covenant shall be asked after.

A crude word, and the third grade

D121 — وبال في ثيابه → and he pissed in his clothes, and the reason is that English has no neutral verb here. بال is the ordinary, unmarked Arabic verb; it is not نيك (D21's obscene grade, V5) and it is not clinical. English offers only the two ends: urinated is a medical word that would break the narration's register in the middle of the span's one moment of physical farce, and made water / wet himself are euphemisms, which V5 forbids in the other direction. Between a crude word and a clinical one, the crude one is the smaller departure from a narration that is otherwise plain — so it is taken, and the fact that the Arabic word is neutral and the English one is not is recorded here as a loss rather than absorbed. This extends D21's three grades (obscene / coarse / clinical) with the case they did not cover: a source word with no English grade at all.

A repeated word beats a rhyme — V18's principle, generalised

D122 — new binding V21: where a word the copy-text repeats and an S1 rhyme attempt want different English, the repetition wins and the rhyme is recorded lost. V18 settled this for T13's cognate figure against S1 at span G. The apparition's epithet chain forces the same collision on a plain repeated noun: قَدّ (figure, build) stands in two of the chain's three rhyming pairs — رشيقة القد and قَدٍّ رجيح.

Rendering القد as physique would have bought a full English rhyme in pair 1 — smooth of cheek and sleek of physique — at the price of printing two different English words for one Arabic word eleven words apart, where the Arabic reader hears it twice. قَدّ is form both times, and pair 1's rhyme is recorded lost. V21 now states the rule so the next collision is not re-argued.

Figures of sound in span I

S1 governs: attempt an English rhyme at each locus, take it only where the sense survives, record the loss where it does not. S5 governs partial. Loci tabulated from the Arabic; the verdict column is written to be parsed, not read.

Eight loci: four carried, one partial, two lost, one frozen from an earlier span. The three rhyming proverbs of this span (I1, I3, I7) are the densest run of proverb-saj' the work has printed so far, and two of the two that were open went across.

The epithet chain is worth its own sentence. رشيقة القد، أسيلة الخد، كاملة الوصف، كحيلة الطرف، بوجه مليح، وقَدٍّ رجيح is exactly the device register open question 8 has been watching for — a multi-member rhymed epithet chain — and this time it is in the copy-text. One carried of three pairs.

The verse

D123 — one bayt, printed twice, identical both times. Rhyme -aynā with taṣrīʿ (both hemistichs of the single bayt end on it). S3 sets it as two English lines and asks for the rhyme at the bayt-end; the taṣrīʿ asks for it at the first hemistich too, and register open question 7 (discharged at span F) says attempt it.

إِنْ عُدْتَ عُدْنَا وَإِنْ وَافَيْتَ وَافَيْنَا · وَإِنْ هَجَرْتَ فَإِنَّا قَدْ تَكَافَيْنَا

If you return, we return; if you hold fast, we hold fast; and if you forsake us, then we are quits at last.

Two rhyme positions, two carried, nothing paid. taṣrīʿ now stands at nine instances over four spans, nine carried. The figure that matters more than the rhyme is the polyptoton — عدت / عدنا, وافيت / وافينا, one verb in two persons, twice — and English carries it whole (you return / we return, you hold fast / we hold fast) because English can also repeat a verb across a change of person. V8 lifts the register a step above the narration (return, not come back).

The second printing is not varied. V14 binds; and the point of the second printing is that the fish say the same thing to the vizier that they said to the cook.

The narratorial hinge, and what the span does about depth

D124 — هذا ما كان من أمر الصياد، وأما ما كان من أمر الجارية → This is what there was of the business of the fisherman. And as for what there was of the business of the slave-girl: The work's first explicit switch of thread — a narrator stepping out to say which of two simultaneous lines he is now following. It is a level-marker of a kind span H did not have: span H's five seams were all entries into and exits from told tales, and this one is a cut inside a single told tale.

The English carries it in full and supplies nothing else. It is joined to what follows by a colon, which is the closest English has to the Arabic's فإنها resumption; no paragraph break, no rule, no heading — V19, which governs. Note that the same page prints هذا ما كان من حديث الملك السندباد in span H with حديث and this one with أمر, and the English words differ accordingly (D126).

D125 — a tale named and refused, for the second time in the work. ولا تعمل كما عمل أمامة مع عاتكة — And do not do as Umama did with Atika — and when the fisherman asks وما شأنهما؟ the ifrit puts it off: This is no time for a story, and I in the prison. This is the same move as the Tale of the Crocodile at span H's L8, and it is the same move used against the same sort of interlocutor. The English glosses neither name, exactly as V17 refused to gloss أم عامر: an English reader gets two names and no story, which is what an Arabic reader gets. شأن takes the frozen affair (T38), so the ifrit's deferral reads with span G's وما شأن وزير الملك يونان.

Lexis and register

D126 — five Arabic nouns for the thing in question, kept as five English words. The span uses أمر, شأن, حديث, قضية and حال inside 880 words, and three of them appear within four lines of one another. Registered as T38: أمر → business, شأن → affair (frozen at span G), حديث → story (frozen at spans E and H), قضية → case, حال → how it stood. The last is a clause rather than a noun, which V7 licenses: أعلمت الوزير بالحال gives a bare abstract noun and the state would read as an error.

D127 — the vessel series gains its seventh and eighth members, registered as T37: ماجور → tub, طاجن → pan. T24 binds one English word to one Arabic word across زير / قمقم / قارورة / إبريق / كوز, with طاسة → bowl added at span H and فسقية → fountain-basin at span A. Basin was therefore unavailable for ماجور and frying-pan was refused for طاجن as two words where the Arabic has one.

D128 — بيت → bayt, registered as T36. T14's rule: a thing that is not an English thing keeps its name. A bayt is not a line (it is two hemistichs set as one line), not a verse (which in English means a stanza as often as a line), and not a couplet (which imports a rhyme between two lines where the Arabic has one line rhyming with the next bayt). The word is already the project's own metrical unit throughout this log; the prose now uses it too.

D129 — صبية → young woman, kept apart from T2's جارية → slave-girl. Two women stand in the kitchen four lines apart and the copy-text uses two words; the English uses two. Girl was refused because it is inside slave-girl, damsel because V1 refuses archaism, and maiden because it supplies a virginity the Arabic does not state.

And this span gives register open question 12 its first instance, and it runs for T2. The جارية of this night is a cook given to the King as a present by the King of Rum, and is property beyond argument. D104 kept slave-girl for the woman at the head of the road who turns out to be a ghoulah, and flagged that a later use of جارية for a woman who cannot be a slave would need an erratum on T2. This is not that use. The flag stands unchanged and one instance has now gone the other way.

D130 — مروءة → manly deeds. فهذا وقت المروءات. The word is a whole ethical vocabulary in Arabic — manliness, honour, the doing of what a decent man does — and English has no single word for it. Rejected: chivalry (imports knights), magnanimity (Latinate and too grand for a jinni haggling out of a bottle), generosity (already spoken for — كرمًا is out of nobleness eight lines earlier, and V16 wants them apart). Manly deeds keeps the plural the Arabic has and the root's man, and is plain. The ethical weight is a recorded loss.

D131 — the realia of the apparition. كوفية → head-cloth (not keffiyeh, which in English now names a modern political garment and is T17's clause exactly); خز → silk (a silk-and-wool weave with no English name, and khazz has no currency at all, so T30's reasoning applies); حلق → hoops and خواتيم → rings, two Arabic words for two kinds of ring kept as two English words; الفصوص المثمنة → stones of price; الخيزران → bamboo. لابسة ملبسها is a cognate figure (T13) and is carried as one: clothed in her clothing, which forced لابسة كوفية → clothed in a head-cloth eight lines earlier so that one Arabic participle is one English verb.

D132 — نجاة → deliverance, kept apart from سلامة → safety (span A) and نجّى → saved (span E). لم يصدق بالنجاة — he did not believe in his deliverance — is the span's one sentence of free indirect thought, and the abstract noun is the source's.

The variations the copy-text makes, carried and not regularised

D133 — four places where the copy-text says the same thing twice and says it differently, and the English differs with it. V16 and V20 govern; this span is the arm's densest cluster of them.

Row 1 is the one that matters beyond this span. The night-formula work (RS-20260815f) measured the copy-text repeating its closing formula letter for letter eight times, similarity 1.000, while the sister's reply after it varied at 4 of 4. Row 1 is a third case and it is on the resumption side: what the copy-text does not keep invariant is the sentence a night restarts from.

The copy-text irregularities carried as they stand

D134 — p. 46 is blank in the printed book, and the reason also explains p. 26. The Wikisource transcription of p. 46 is empty at proofread level 0, which in this book has meant a plate twice (p. 30) and a genuinely blank page once (p. 26). The page image was read at 700px: it is blank.

And the rule behind it is now visible and is checkable. Every night heading in this volume opens an odd page: night 1 p. 19, night 2 p. 23, night 3 p. 27, night 4 p. 33, night 5 p. 37, night 6 p. 43, night 7 p. 47 — seven for seven. The two "missing" pages of this copy-text are the versos the rule leaves over: p. 26 before night 3's recto, p. 46 before night 7's recto. This is not a translation decision and nothing in the English turns on it; it is recorded because two separate spans have now stopped to establish that a blank page was not a transcription gap, and after this one no span needs to.

The night 6 → 7 seam is thin, and it is thin in a way already on the table. The dawn formula stands alone at the foot of p. 45 — no Dunyazad, no how sweet is your telling, no night in each other's arms, no court day — and night 7 opens on p. 47 with its heading and قالت: بلغني. That is D70's third type (bare formula, no frame passage, بلغني alone), recurring for the first time. Five boundaries have now been rendered: full, heading-displaced, bare, full, bare. Register open question 10 asked whether a fourth kind of thinning would appear; it has not. The thinning repeats, which makes it a habit of the book rather than a slip, and V15 carries it as printed.

What was hard, in order

1. العهد القديم. Two hours of the span's thinking, and the answer came from Arabic rather than from English: the phrase names the Old Testament in Arabic too. Everything before that was an attempt to escape a resonance the source has got.
2. The epithet chain. Six members, three rhyming pairs, and one carried — the worst rate of any sound-figure cluster in this arm. I5 in particular was worked at length; every rhyme found for it narrowed وصف to praise, and a rhyme bought by narrowing a word is S1's explicit refusal.
3. بال. The temptation was made water, which reads as period-costume English and is a euphemism V5 forbids. Choosing the crude end of a range the Arabic does not occupy is a real cost and is written up rather than smoothed.
4. مروءة. No solution, only a least-bad rendering. Recorded as a loss.
5. The bayt. The easiest thing in the span, and the reason is worth naming: the Arabic figure is a repeated verb across a change of person, which is one of the few figures English is as well equipped for as Arabic.

Errata

R05 §2: nothing above this line is revised; corrections are numbered and dated here.

E1 — 2026-08-14. The contamination paragraph points the reader at RS-20260814-saj-carriage-alf-layla for the measured overlap. The result page is wiki/findings/results/RS-20260814-saj-carriage.md (§7). A pointer, not a claim; the frozen text stands as written.

E2 — 2026-08-15. The header (title line and Source paragraph) names span A and the span-A source file only; the page now carries spans A, B and C — Hindawi 2022 vol. 1 pp. 11–18, 2,260 Arabic words, stored as ../source-hindawi-2022-span{A,B,C}.txt. Recorded as an erratum rather than repaired in place, per R05 §2. Span C completes the frame tale; the first night begins on p. 19.

E3 — 2026-08-15. Two statements of fact in the span-C log are wrong and are corrected here rather than edited in place (R05 §2). Both were found by E-20260815's pre-run adversarial critic, before any cell was dispatched and before either comparator was opened, so nothing downstream rests on either.

1. D41: "The ninth and last locus in the enumeration" is false, and with it the rule "the first eight in copy-text order". The enumeration of criterion-(b) cognate figures is not complete. At least two more exist in span C — رمى عنق زوجته … وكذلك أعناق الجواري (ع-ن-ق), which falls before PT2 in copy-text order, and أُحدِّثك حديثًا (ح-د-ث). The selection rule is withdrawn; the five cognate figures the log records are the five the translator worked on (D30), which is a principled and checkable set but not an exhaustive one, and E-20260815 §4 uses them as an explicitly non-exhaustive stratum. The criterion-(a) enumeration — four loci of saj' and muwāzana — is separately claimed complete, with its exclusions published.
2. D42: "Six of the eight PL segments are direct speech and two are narration" is a miscount. The true composition is four pure speech (PL2–PL5), three pure narration (PL6–PL8), one mixed (PL1). The confound D42 names is real and is if anything slightly milder than stated; the correction matters because it is what makes a narration-only slice possible at all, which is the remedy the critic required.

Nothing in the translated prose or in any other decision is affected. The frozen text stands as written.

E4 — 2026-08-15. The header still names span A only; the page now carries spans A, B, C and D — Hindawi 2022 vol. 1 pp. 11–22, 3,022 Arabic words, stored as ../source-hindawi-2022-span{A,B,C,D}.txt. Span C completed the frame tale and span D is the first night whole. Recorded as an erratum rather than repaired in place, per R05 §2; E2 recorded the same defect at span C and is superseded in extent, not in kind.

E5 — 2026-08-15. The contamination block's priming event (i) says Burton's night-closing formula "does not occur in span A". True, and now insufficient: it occurs in span D, and D43 records what was done about it. The block is not edited; this erratum is the pointer.

E6 — 2026-08-16. The header still names span A only; the page now carries spans A–E — Hindawi 2022 vol. 1 pp. 11–28, 4,507 Arabic words, stored as ../source-hindawi-2022-span{A,B,C,D,E}.txt. Span E completes the Tale of the Merchant and the Ifrit. Recorded as an erratum rather than repaired in place, per R05 §2; E2 and E4 recorded the same defect and are superseded in extent, not in kind.

E7 — 2026-08-20. The header still names span A only; the page now carries spans A–F — Hindawi 2022 vol. 1 pp. 11–33, 5,516 Arabic words, stored as ../source-hindawi-2022-span{A,B,C,D,E,F}.txt. Span F is the copy-text's third night whole — the Tale of the Fisherman and the Ifrit to the fisherman's stratagem — and crosses the seam into the fourth night. Recorded as an erratum rather than repaired in place, per R05 §2; E2, E4 and E6 recorded the same defect and are superseded in extent, not in kind.

E8 — 2026-08-20. The contamination block declares two priming events. A third is declared here rather than left implicit: before translating span F the lead knew cucurbit as Burton's word for قمقم, from training and not from any text opened this session. D72 refuses it by name and gives the reason. No published rendering of span F was read before this page and the span-F log were frozen.

E9 — 2026-08-21. The header still names span A only; the page now carries spans A–G — Hindawi 2022 vol. 1 pp. 11–36, 6,872 Arabic words, stored as ../source-hindawi-2022-span{A,B,C,D,E,F,G}.txt. Span G is the copy-text's fourth night whole — the fisherman's counter-tale, and the Tale of King Yunan and the Sage Ruyan as far as the envious vizier's first move. Recorded as an erratum rather than repaired in place, per R05 §2; E2, E4, E6 and E7 recorded the same defect and are superseded in extent, not in kind.

E10 — 2026-08-21. The contamination block declares three priming events. A fourth, and the most serious of them, is declared in the span-G log rather than here: five lines of Burton's rendering of span G itself were printed to the terminal by a grep before span G was translated — including his bat for صولجان and his Duban for رويان, both refused by name. This is the first span of this arm in which any part of a comparator's rendering of the span itself was seen before translating, and it is why E-20260821c excludes the lead's row from its primary on two grounds.

E11 — 2026-08-23. The header still names span A only; the page now carries spans A–H — Hindawi 2022 vol. 1 pp. 11–42, 8,641 Arabic words, stored as ../source-hindawi-2022-span{A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H}.txt. Span H is the copy-text's fifth night whole — the Tale of King Sindbad and the Falcon, the tale of the vizier who contrived against a king's son, and the death of King Yunan. Recorded as an erratum rather than repaired in place, per R05 §2; E2, E4, E6, E7 and E9 recorded the same defect and are superseded in extent, not in kind.

E12 — 2026-08-23. The span-H log's list of copy-text irregularities (D115) is incomplete, and the fifth is the largest of them. Found after the freeze, by the study limb, exactly as E3 was: the copy-text elides the beheading and the talking head. The sage instructs the King how to sever his head and what to do with it, and the very next clause is ثم افتح الكتاب، ففتحه الملك — then open the book. So the King opened it. There is no execution on the page, no head on the tray, no blood stanched and no head opening its eyes; the sage goes on speaking, and the King dies. The second Arabic witness has the same hole, and Lane, Burton and Forster all print the execution and all print the severed head answering (RS-20260823b-embedding-carriage §7). The translation carries the gap because V15 carries what is printed, and the rendering above stands as written; what is corrected here is the log's claim that D115 lists the span's copy-text irregularities. It lists four of five.

E13 — 2026-08-25. The header still names span A only; the page now carries spans A–I — Hindawi 2022 vol. 1 pp. 11–45, 9,521 Arabic words, stored as ../source-hindawi-2022-span{A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I}.txt. Span I is the copy-text's sixth night whole — the fisherman and the ifrit's covenant, the pool of four-coloured fish, and the young woman who comes out of the kitchen wall. Recorded as an erratum rather than repaired in place, per R05 §2; E2, E4, E9 and E11 recorded the same defect at spans C, D, G and H and are superseded in extent, not in kind.

Translator's log — span J

Written at translation time, 2026-08-26. Frozen before either comparator was opened. D135–D150, continuing span I's D134. The span's study limb (E-20260826c-register-cost) was designed and frozen before this span was translated, from spans A–I only, and contains nothing from span J; so nothing here could shape it and nothing in it could shape this.

The contamination this span incurs, declared before anything else

contamination: suspected, and higher than any span of this arm so far. Span J opens the Tale of the Ensorcelled Prince — the Black Islands, the queen who drugs her husband's cup, the black slave among the rubbish-mounds. It is one of the two or three most reproduced episodes in the whole work, quoted at length in criticism the lead has read, and the lead had a definite memory of Burton's rendering of the slave's lips before it opened the Arabic. The memory was written down before the paragraph was translated and the readings in it are refused by name:

• Burton's simile for غطاء / وطاء — the pot-lid and the shoe-sole. Refused. What the Arabic says is a cover and a thing laid under, which is a bedding pair and not a kitchen one; D142.
• Burton's Sleep on, would thou might never wake more for نَمْ ليتك لم تَقُمْ. Refused; this translation writes Sleep, and I wish you may not get up, which is V1's plain grammar.
• Burton's booza for بوضة. Refused; D141.
• الجزائر السود → the Black Islands is the received English and this translation writes it too. It is the plain sense of two plain words and there was nothing to refuse; recorded so that the coincidence is not later read as independence.

Three of the four are refusals of a remembered rendering, not of a text opened; the fourth is an agreement declared. dependence_check over the finished span is reported in the collation.

The governing decision of this span

D135 — جارية in the queen's own mouth, and the register's open question 12 is discharged in the register's favour. The register's unresolved section, written at span H, set the bar itself:

If a later span uses جارية of a woman who cannot possibly be a slave, T2 needs an erratum — and this decision is why it will be needed.

Span J uses it. هل عندك ما تأكله جاريتك؟ — have you anything for your slave-girl to eat? — is said by the daughter of the king's brother, wife of the king of the Black Islands, to the slave she has walked across a city to lie with. She cannot possibly be a slave, and the bar is met. And the erratum is not needed, for a reason the question had not foreseen: the use is not descriptive but self-abasing, and slave-girl is doing in English exactly what جارية is doing in Arabic. The whole point of the sentence is that a woman of royal blood calls herself a slave to a slave; young woman, or any softening, deletes the inversion the scene is built on. T2 stands unchanged and strengthened, and question 12 is discharged.

The cost is elsewhere, and it is real. The same term at span H (D104) fell on a woman at the head of the road who says in her next breath that she is a king's daughter, and there it decided something the Arabic left open. One term, two later spans, one place it costs and one place it pays — which is the whole of what a binding register is, and is why the study limb of this span measures it rather than asserting it. The two loci are L1 of E-20260826c and its own §4.

Span J also prints جاريتين of the two women fanning the king and الجواري of their talk. Those are ordinary and unremarkable, and are counted here only so that the span's four occurrences are on the record: two descriptive, one collective, one rhetorical.

The night that runs five pages, and a fourth kind of copy-text irregularity

D136 — the copy-text's seventh night has no internal boundary, and its running head on p. 49 says night 9. The night is headed فلما كانت الليلة ٧ on p. 47 and closed by the dawn formula, the full frame passage and the Dunyazad exchange at the foot of p. 51 — the fullest seam this arm has rendered, marked by every means the copy-text has. Between them lie five printed pages and no heading, no formula, and no frame.

The running heads disagree with each other. p. 49 (recto) carries فلما كانت الليلة ٩; p. 51 (recto) carries فلما كانت الليلة ٧. A running head cannot advance to night 9 on p. 49 and go back to night 7 on p. 51, so one of the two is wrong, and the internal evidence says it is p. 49's: the night is headed 7, the next night is 8, and the text runs on unbroken through both pages.

Both Arabic witnesses settle the segmentation independently. Witness 2 (../collation.md §2) carries the identical stretch with no boundary anywhere in it, closes it with the same dawn formula and frame, and then heads what follows وفي الليلة الثامنة — and on the eighth night. Two unrelated digitisations agree that this is one night and that the next is the eighth.

What could not be checked, and is declared rather than assumed. The page images could not be fetched this session: upload.wikimedia.org returned its robot-policy refusal (HTTP 403, then 429) to every request made, with and without a descriptive user-agent. So whether الليلة ٩ is the printed book's misprint or the Wikisource transcriber's typing slip is not established here, and this log does not claim to know. On either account the head is wrong, and on either account the night is one night. Span F read a plate from a page image at 500px and span I read a blank verso the same way; this span could not, and says so.

Register open question 10, discharged at span F, gains its fifth and sixth boundaries and the fourth kind of irregularity is not a thinning at all: the night 6 → 7 and 7 → 8 seams are both marked in full. What is irregular is the apparatus of the printed book — a running head that contradicts the heading two pages behind it — and that is a fact about this edition, not about the tradition. It goes to the collation page, not to the register.

The plate on p. 48, and a sentence the book prints twice

D137 — the caption is carried, set off as a caption, and V14 binds it to the narrative. p. 48 carries an illustration ({{missing image}} in the transcription — the plate itself is not uploaded) with the caption فوجد الملِك في وسط القصر أربعةَ سِباعٍ من الذهب الأحمر تُلقِي الماء من أفواهها. The narrative prints the same clause on p. 49 (وفي وسطه فسقية عليها أربعة سباع من الذهب الأحمر، تُلقِي الماء من أفواهها). V14 says that where the copy-text repeats wording the English repeats it exactly, and the caption is wording the copy-text prints; so four lions of red gold casting the water from their mouths stands in both places, letter for letter.

The caption is also proleptic — it describes something that happens a page later, in the middle of a sentence about a wilderness the King has not yet crossed — and the English carries it where the book puts it, which is V15's principle applied to furniture rather than to seams. This is the third piece of book-apparatus this arm has had to decide about, after span F's full-page plate (D70 region) and span I's blank verso.

Three ways for the world to go dark, and three Englishes

D138 — V16 fires twice in one span on the same image. The copy-text has:

Three formulations of one figure, in one work, none of them identical to another. V16 says that where the copy-text substitutes a word in a chain it has printed before, the English substitutes a word, so the three are three in English too, and a reader comparing them sees the substitutions the Arabic made. T8's calque is not extended to cover the other two: it is the rendering of اسودت, and neither of this span's sentences has that verb.

ويل, rendered by force and not by root

D139 — the same word is damn to a second person and ruin to oneself, and the reason is written down. ويلك occurs twice in the span (a slave-girl to her fellow, p. 50; the slave to the queen, p. 51) and يا ويلي once (the queen to the slave, p. 51). V20's rule — a morphological variant is not a substitution — would want one English word for all three. It is refused here, and this is the first refusal of V20 in the arm. ويلك is an imprecation thrown at someone and يا ويلي is a lament for oneself; they are the same noun and opposite speech acts, and an English word that covers both (woe to you / woe to me) buys the consistency by archaising, which V1 forbids. So: Damn you twice, and my ruin once. The loss is that a reader cannot see that the queen answers the slave's word with his own, and it is recorded, not absorbed.

A collision V7 relieves rather than V18 decides

D140 — عالمًا بالأمور → learned in the way of things, and T38 does not bind here. T38 fixes أمر → business, and this span uses it twice in that sense (a business that cannot be hidden, a business there is no keeping quiet about). The plural in وزيرًا خبيرًا عاقلًا لبيبًا عالمًا بالأمور is not that word doing that job: it is a bare abstract plural meaning matters in general, and learned in business in modern English means commerce. V7 covers exactly this — render by sense where the source gives a bare abstract noun — so the collision is settled by a rule already in the register and does not need V18's or V21's priority ruling. Recorded because the arm has now met three kinds of register collision and this is the cheapest: the register contains its own release.

Lexis and register

D141 — the vessel series reaches ten members, extending T24 and T37: لقان → trough and قوارة → crock, both taking words no earlier span used. Basin was already unavailable (فسقية → fountain-basin, T6), pan is طاجن, tub is ماجور, bowl is طاسة. بوضة → beer: the drink is būẓa, fermented barley; T14's rule would keep the Arabic word, but it has no English currency at all, and bouza on the page would be a word with no content. Burton's booza is refused by name (§contamination).

D142 — إحدى شفتَيْه غطاء، وشفته الثانية وطاء → one of his two lips a spread and his second lip a bed, and the rhyme carries. غطاء is what is spread over you and وطاء what is spread under you; they are a bedding pair in Arabic and they rhyme. Spread and bed are a bedding pair in English and they rhyme. Nothing was paid for it — the one locus of the span where the figure and the sense wanted the same words. Burton's kitchen-and-cobbler simile is refused (§contamination).

D143 — three words for being with someone, kept apart, and one of them pays for a rhyme. صورة → face, عشرة → embrace, صحبة → company. The first two carry the span's صورتك / عشرتك rhyme — hated your face … wearied of your embrace — and the price is that عشرة is consorting, living with, and embrace narrows it to the body. Coded carried, paid for in sense, and named here so the narrowing is not read as a reading of the Arabic. صورة could not take form, which V21 binds to قَدّ.

D144 — فتوة → manhood, kept apart from مروءة → manly deeds (T39). The slave swears وحق فتوَّة السودان and then measures it against مروءتنا and مروءة البيضان in the next breath; the two words are the code and the conduct, and one English word for both would flatten the sentence the oath turns on.

D145 — زانية → adulteress, kept apart from عاهرة → whore (V6, T at D9). Both are in the span, four lines apart in the first case and a page apart in the second, and V6 wants abuse to stay abuse: neither is softened and neither takes the other's word.

D146 — the rest of the span's new terms. دهليز → passage; مجلس → sitting-room; ستر → curtain; قباء → tunic and طراز → border (T14's rule sends tiraz to a description — the loanword has no English currency); سرة → navel; بشر → a man (the contrast is with stone, and human flesh would gloss); عصمة → keeping; بنج → the drug (bhang falls to T17's clause — the English form has been taken over by cannabis); قبة → dome;حصن→ *stronghold*;الكيمان→ *the rubbish-mounds*;قش القصب→ *cane-straw*;عشيقة→ *mistress*;عنبر→ *ambergris* andترس→ *shield*;جبل قاف→ *Mount Qaf* (T14);متشوش→ *out of sorts*;الهدمة والشراميط→ *the rag and the tatters* (T7, a doublet kept a doublet);ذراع→ *a forearm* (*cubit* isV1's archaism). Names,T1: **Mahmud**, **Masudah**, **the Black Islands**.مسعودةtakesT20`'s rule — the feminine of a name kept stays feminine — and it is the feminine of span A's Masud*, the black slave in the garden, which is a coincidence of the copy-text and is carried as one.

D147 — كبد حزين → a grieving liver, and it is not glossed. The liver is the Arabic seat of grief. V7 does not apply — the noun is concrete, not abstract — and T8's calque of a whole clause is the precedent. An English reader gets a strange organ and no explanation, which is what the Arabic gives an English reader and what V17 decided for the hyena.

D148 — مبتل is a crux and is rendered flat. وهو مبتل وراقد على قليل من قش القصب reads most plainly as and he wet — soaked, from بلل. It could be مُبْتَلًى, afflicted, which would say something about the slave's body that the sentence otherwise does not say; witness 2's مبتلي is garbled and settles nothing. The English takes the plain reading and the alternative is recorded, on D6's model: if مبتل recurs in this sense the crux resolves.

Figures of sound in span J

Nine loci, tabulated from the Arabic before any English for them existed. S1 governs: attempt, take only where the sense survives, record the loss.

Five carried, one partial, three lost — and two of the three losses were decided before this span existed. Locus 1 is V14 binding span I's are you abiding by the old covenant?, where the Arabic القديم / مقيم rhymes and the English does not; locus 9 is V12, written once at span D for every night in the work, where the end-rhyme was recorded lost and a polyptoton supplied at the same seam. Neither loss was available to this span to repair. That is the standing cost of a binding register, counted for the second time (span H counted it first, at three of four), and it is what this span's study limb went out to measure on the other nine spans.

Locus 3 is the same three-member chain span I rendered of the young woman, applied here to the young man; V14 binds a form full of grace to قَدٍّ رجيح and lovely to مليح, and only the third member was free. Locus 4 is the span's one clean failure with nothing frozen behind it: أزهر, أحمر and عنبر rhyme on a syllable English has no stock of, and every candidate pair bought the rhyme by inventing a comparison the Arabic has not got.

The verse

D149 — two poems, and both are irregular in the printed book.

Poem 1 (p. 49) is five hemistichs, not four or six: the copy-text prints two abyāt and then a third whose first hemistich is empty ({{أبيات|…\\ها مهجتي…}}), so the fifth hemistich stands alone. Witness 2 prints the same shape, the last hemistich outside its own centred block. The English carries the shape: four lines, a break, and a fifth. All five hemistichs rhyme in Arabic — this is not taṣrīʿ at the head but monorhyme throughout — and all five rhyme in English. The one line paid for is the third: تزايد بالفكر, increased by thoughts, takes and their strain for the rhyme.

D150 — poem 1 quotes the Qur'an and the copy-text does not mark it. يا وجدُ لا تُبْقِي عليَّ ولا تَذَرْ carries لا تُبْقِي ولا تَذَرُ of Q 74:28, where the words are said of the fire Saqar. Span I's Qur'anic quotation (Q 17:34) was marked by a typographic template and by nothing else (D119 region); this one is marked by nothing at all, because it is an allusion inside a love poem and not a citation. The English supplies no mark either — V10's principle, and V15's: where the copy-text marks nothing, the English marks nothing. The allusion is recorded here so that a later hand knows it was seen and refused a footnote.

Poem 2 (p. 49) is three abyāt, and its third bayt splits a word across the hemistich boundary: فَوْقَ الْوَجْنَةِ الْـ ‖ ـحَمْرَاءِ. The copy-text prints the two halves with the connecting hyphens. The English carries the split — the cheek that is crim— ‖ —son — which is the first time this arm has had a mid-word division to reproduce and the first time English could take one, because crimson has a seam where red has none. S3's rule was followed for the rest: one English line per hemistich, monorhyme at the bayt-ends.

What was hard, in order

1. جاريتك in the queen's mouth. Written up as D135. The register's own question came due and the answer went the other way from the one the question expected.
2. The night that would not end. Five pages, no seam, and a running head insisting it was night
3. The segmentation was settled from the two Arabic witnesses because the page images were unreachable, and the log says which of those two things it is standing on.
4. عشرة. The rhyme at face / embrace is the best sound in the span and it narrows a word that means a shared life to a word that means a body. It was taken and it is named.
5. أزهر / أحمر / عنبر. Three attempts, all of them bought by inventing a simile, all of them refused; locus 4 is lost and the drafts are not preserved because none of them was a translation of the sentence.
6. The lips. The one place where the memory of a famous English rendering was loudest and the Arabic turned out to say something plainer and better than the memory.