Repository path: workshop/translations/kalila-labwa/R37-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-kalila-labwa-R37-v1 — «باب اللبؤة والإسوار والشغبر» (Kalīla wa-Dimna), rendered whole under R37, the declared-rule hand

Work. ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (d. c. 757), «كليلة ودمنة» — the chapter «باب اللبؤة والإسوار والشغبر», The Lioness, the Horseman and the Jackal: the lioness whose two cubs are killed by a mounted hunter, and the jackal who tells her that what she has suffered is what she has spent a hundred years doing. The fourth chapter of this work the project has rendered whole, after «باب السائح والصائغ» (R30, sound-plain), «باب الناسك والضيف» (R34, ornamentalist) and «باب الناسك وابن عرس» (R36, answering hand).

Copy-text. Arabic Wikisource, كليلة ودمنة/باب اللبوة والإسوار والشغبر, retrieved 2026-08-16; ../source-wikisource-labwa.txt, 599 words of body text in 37 sentences. Collated whole against the Amīriyya (Būlāq) 1937 printing, صفحة:كليلة ودمنة.pdf/296–300, in ../collation.md: five substantive adoptions, all from witness 2, including musk for asceticism at [30]. The adopted text is ../copy-text-adopted.txt and it, not the raw copy-text, is what was translated. Witness 2's transcription is level="1" — not proofread — and §3.3 of the collation says what that costs.

Comparator. Wyndham Knatchbull, Kalila and Dimna, or The Fables of Bidpai, Oxford 1819, The Lioness and the Horseman (archive.org kalilaanddimnao00almgoog), translated from de Sacy's Arabic. Extracted programmatically by heading offset and not opened until this rendering and its log were committed. Contamination measured after the freeze: contamination: none — see §6.

Regime. R37 the declared-rule hand (../../../regimes/R37-declared-rule.md): two rules for what counts as a sound figure are written out first, the source is enumerated twice, the union of the two sets is answered, no device goes anywhere else, and every device is tagged with the rule that licenses it.

Extent. The chapter whole: 599 Arabic words → 1,078 English words (lead-declared.txt).

Why this chapter and this regime. RS-20260816c set out to ask whether a reader who can see the Arabic can tell a translator's invented ornament from a genuine compensation, and never got to ask it: the gate in front of the question failed, because the project's inventory of the Arabic's sound figures and the figures three readers of the Arabic will endorse agreed on only 5 of 10. The disagreement was not noise. It was three nameable rules. This rendering does the thing that has to happen before the arm's own question can be put again: it writes both rules down as rules, applies each to a fresh chapter of the same work, and renders the union so that the size of the disagreement is a fact about English prose and not about a census.

1. The rendering

King Dabshalīm said to Baydabā the philosopher: I have heard this fable. Now set me a fable of the man who lets go the harming of another when he has the power to harm, because of the harm that has come upon himself, so that what falls upon him becomes for him a warner and a restrainer from committing wrong and enmity against others.

The philosopher said: None sets himself to seek what harms people and does them injury but the people of ignorance and folly, of ill judgement of consequences in the affairs of this world and the next, of little knowledge of what comes upon them thereby in the descent of retribution, and of what binds them in the reckoning of what they have earned — a reckoning the minds of men cannot compass. And though one of them be spared another's harm by a death that meets him before the evil of what he did comes down on him — yet he who takes no thought for the event is not safe from the accident, and has no right to escape the punishment.

And it may be that the ignorant man is admonished, and is instructed by the harm that reaches him from another, and is deterred from visiting the like of it upon anyone in wrong and aggression; and there comes to him in the end the profit of the harm to another that he held back from. The like of that is the story of the lioness, the horseman and the jackal.

The king said: And how was that?

The philosopher said: They say that a lioness was in a thicket, and she had two cubs; and she went out in search of game and left them in their cave; and a horseman passed by them and bore down upon them and shot them and killed them, and flayed their two skins and strapped them to his saddle and rode off with them to his house. Then she came back. And when she saw the frightful thing that had come upon them, she writhed belly over back, and she wailed and she railed.

And beside her there was a jackal. And when he heard that crying of hers he said to her: What is this you are doing? And what has come down on you? Tell me of it.

The lioness said: My two cubs — a horseman passed by them and killed them, and flayed their two skins and strapped them to his saddle and flung them out on the open ground.

The jackal said to her: Forbear your crying; deal fair by yourself; and be aware that this horseman has done nothing to you but what you were doing to others and were bringing upon more than one of them — men who felt for their own kin and for those dear to them what you feel now for your two cubs. So bear another's deed upon you as another bore your deed; for it has been said, as you deal, so shall you be dealt with. And every work has its fruit, of requiting or of smiting; and both are measured to it, in the great and in the small: as the crop, when the harvest comes, yields according to its seed.

The lioness said: Make plain to me what you say, and speak out the meaning of it.

The jackal said: How many years have come to you?

The lioness said: A hundred years.

The jackal said: What was your food?

The lioness said: The flesh of wild beasts.

The jackal said: Who fed it to you?

The lioness said: I hunted the wild beasts and ate them.

The jackal said: Those wild beasts you used to eat — had they no fathers and mothers?

She said: They had.

The jackal said: Then how is it that I do not see, and do not hear, from those fathers and mothers, of grief and clamour, what I see and hear from you? Nothing has come down on you but what came down; and it came for the ill of your looking to what follows, and the little of your thinking upon it, and the blindness of your not knowing what of its harm returns upon you.

And when the lioness heard that from the jackal's speech, she knew that it was of her own bringing upon herself, and that her work had been injustice and oppression; and she left the hunt, and turned away from the eating of flesh to fruits and abstinence and worship.

And when the ring-dove that was the master of that thicket, whose living was from the fruits, saw that, he said to her: I had thought the trees had not borne this year of ours, for want of water. But when I saw you eating them — and you a flesh-eater — and saw that you had left your own provision and your own food and what God had portioned to you, and had turned to another's provision, and diminished it, and pressed in upon him in it: I knew that the trees had fruited this year as they used to fruit before, and that the failing of the fruit came only from you. Woe to the trees, and woe to the fruits, and woe to him whose living is from them! How swift is their perishing, when one presses in upon them in their provision, and overbears them in it — one who has no portion in it and was never used to eating it!

And when the lioness heard that from the ring-dove's speech, she left the eating of fruits and set herself to the eating of grass, and to worship.

And I have set you this fable only that you may know that the ignorant man is sometimes turned by a harm that reaches him from the harm of others — as the lioness was turned, by what she met with in her two cubs, from the eating of flesh, and then, at the ring-dove's word, from the eating of fruits; and set herself to abstinence and worship. And men have the better right to look well to this; for it has been said, what does not please you in your own case, do not do in another's case. For in that is justice; and in justice is the contentment of God — exalted be He — and the contentment of men.

2. The two rules, written out before any English was written

Both are stated here as rules a second person could apply mechanically to the same text. Neither is this page's invention: Rule A is imported verbatim from a page frozen three chapters ago; Rule B is the rule three readers of the Arabic were observed applying, written down as a rule for the first time.

2.1 Rule A — the project's standing inventory rule

Imported verbatim from T-kalila-saih-R30-v1 §3, by way of ../../kalila-nasik/R34-v1 §3 and ../../kalila-ibn-urs/R36-v1 §3:

A locus is admitted if two or more adjacent cola or members show either (i) saj' — rhyme at their ends — or (ii) muwāzana — the same morphological pattern, or the same word, repeated in matched position.

Exclusions: (a) rhyme produced solely by an identical enclitic pronoun (‑هُ، ‑ها) is not admitted; (b) the cognate figure (root echo between a verb and its object) is a separate class and is not counted; (c) repetition of the narrative formula قال … قال is not a chosen figure; (d) a recurrence spread across the whole chapter is not localisable and is excluded.

2.2 Rule B — the rule the readers of the Arabic applied

Derived from RS-20260816c §5, which recorded three unanimous or near-unanimous disagreements between the seats and Rule A, each with the seats' own stated reasons. Written as a rule:

A locus is admitted if two or more adjacent cola or members either (i) end in the same rhyme consonant and the same following ending — however that ending is produced: by a rhyming word, by a shared morphological ending, or by an identical enclitic pronoun — or (ii) show the same root in two different morphological shapes (jinās / ishtiqāq).

Nothing else is admitted. In particular: a matched morphological pattern that does not rhyme is not admitted, and a word repeated unchanged is not admitted.

Rule B reproduces all three of RS-20260816c §5's disagreements and contradicts none of them. O19 (لسانك … لسان, a word repeated unchanged, no end rhyme) is declined — observed 0 of 3. O9 (كثيرة / كثرة, أثمار / ثمار, a root in changed shapes) is admitted — observed 3 of 3. O16, O10, O6 (cola ending in ‑ها, ‑اتِه) are admitted — observed 7 of 8 valid bodies. O15 (تدرج وتمشي) and O20 (ألا تدركه، وتنسى، وترجع), matched shapes that do not rhyme, are declined — observed 0 of 3 each.

2.3 Two application notes, declared here and applied to both rules alike

1. Rhyme means the same rhyme consonant (rawī) and the same following ending, which is what the classical criterion is. A shared case-vowel alone is not rhyme: واعظاً / زاجراً do not rhyme, because ظ and ر differ. This is stated because Rule A's clause (i) says only "rhyme at their ends" and would otherwise admit every indefinite accusative doublet in the chapter.
2. The repeated element must be a content word. Anaphora of a particle (ما، لا، من، في، لي) is not counted by either rule. This is how Rule A was in fact applied at the three earlier chapters — none of their thirty-odd loci is a function word — and it is stated so that a second hand applying these rules to this chapter reaches the same list.

2.4 The one place the collation leaves open

../collation.md §3.3 records that witness 2's reading at [4] is probably «لم ينظر في العواقب», against the copy-text's «لم يفكر». If so, [4] carries a root echo with [29]'s «لسوء نظرك في العواقب» — but they are twenty-five sentences apart and non-localisable, so neither rule would admit it and the inventories below are unaffected. Recorded because it is the kind of thing that is discovered late and looks like an error.

3. The two inventories, frozen before any English was written

Twenty-seven loci in the union, in copy-text order. Sentence numbers are ../collation.md §2's. A = admitted by Rule A; B = admitted by Rule B.

3.0 Erratum — three loci reclassified after an independent critic read the table

Added 2026-08-16, after the freeze and before any body was dispatched. The pre-run adversarial critic of E-20260816h was given this table and the two rules and asked, among other things, to say where the class is wrong. It named three loci, and on two of them it was right and on the third the amendment it forced is right. The corrections are made here rather than left in a result page's limits section, because the counts in §3.1 are this rendering's own headline.

• F17 (نظرك … تفكيرك … وجهالتك) is not a Rule-B locus. Rule B requires the members to end in the same sound. These three ‑ك words are not member-final: they are followed by «في العواقب», «فيها» and «بما يرجع عليك من ضرها», whose ends are العواقب / فيها / ضرها. The chain is three identical enclitics in matched internal position, which is a figure neither written rule admits. Withdrawn from both sets.
• F23 (بضرٍ … ضرِّ الناس) is not a word repeated unchanged. Indefinite with tanwīn against a construct: Rule A's clause says the same word, and these are two states of it. Withdrawn from Rule A. (It would be a Rule-B ROOT locus only under a reading of ishtiqāq that covers inflection, which Rule B does not state; it is withdrawn from both.)
• F8 (لا تضجِّي … وأنصفي … واعلمي) is not securely in either set. Its members are not member-final under the amendment below, so Rule B does not admit it; and the three verbs are a negative jussive, a form-IV imperative and a form-I imperative, which is matched position but not one morphological pattern, so Rule A's clause (ii) does not cleanly admit it either. Withdrawn from both sets and recorded as unclassified.

The amendment the corrections rest on, stated so a second hand can apply it. A member's end is the last word of its colon, a colon being delimited by a coordinating conjunction, a pause mark, or the sentence end; in a bare doublet «X وY» the members are X and Y. Applied uniformly, this also re-marks three loci to their member-final stretches only, without changing their class: F5 to عليهما / ورماهما / فقتلهما / فاحتقبهما, F7 to فقتلهما / فاحتقبهما, F21 to هلاكهم / أرزاقهم.

The English is unchanged. All 27 devices stand in the rendering; what changes is which rule is recorded as licensing three of them. F8, F17 and F23 are now devices this hand wrote at places neither declared rule admits — which is the ornamentalist's reflex, caught a fourth, fifth and sixth time, and caught by somebody else.

3.1 The number this rendering exists to produce

Both the figure as first computed and the figure after §3.0 are printed, because the first is what one hand produced unaided and the second is what survived a reading by another.

Two written rules for "the places where the source has a sound figure", applied to the same 599 words of Arabic by the same hand on the same afternoon, agree on 5 of 24 places — 21%.

RS-20260816c measured the analogous quantity as an agreement of 13 of 21 sites and 5 of 10 figures between the inventory and three readers' majority verdicts. This is a different and larger quantity and must not be reported as a replication of it: there, one of the two sets was a jury's aggregate on 21 pre-selected sites; here both sets are written rules applied to a whole chapter with no site list in front of them. What the two numbers have in common is only their direction.

The disagreement is structured, not scattered. The two rules are not a strict one and a loose one. They cut the class in different directions (counts after the erratum):

• Rule A owns repetition and matched shape — 13 of its 18 loci are invisible to Rule B, and every one of them is either a word repeated unchanged (8) or a morphological pattern that does not rhyme (5).
• Rule B owns audible ending — 6 of its 11 loci are invisible to Rule A, and every one of them is either a rhyme carried by a grammatical ending or enclitic (3) or a root in a changed shape (3).
• What they share is the small class where a figure is both matched in shape and audible at the end: 5 loci.

4. The census: where the devices landed, and what each rule cost

For each locus: the device, the rule that licenses it, the plain wording refused, and the word cost. The plain wording is what this hand would have written at that span under the other rule, and it was written into this table at the same sitting as the device.

4.1 The four numbers this census exists to print

1. Every one of the 27 loci in the union was answered, and 26 of them in kind. The one reduction is F8: the Arabic has three imperatives rhyming on ‑ي and the English has three imperatives of which only two rhyme (fair / aware), forbear carrying the first member on assonance alone. Recorded as reduced, not carried, exactly as R36's E11 was.

2. ~~Not one device sits at a place in neither set.~~ Three do — F8, F17 and F23, and this hand did not find them; the pre-run critic of the study limb did (§3.0). The claim as first written was true of the hand's own classification and false of a stricter one, which is precisely the failure mode a declared-rule regime exists to expose. The line R36 proved could be held is not held here at 27 of 27; it is held at 24 of 27, against a target set 42% larger than R36's (27 loci against 19).

3. The two rules cost almost the same and buy almost nothing in common. Counts after §3.0.

A translator who declares Rule A writes 18 devices for +29 words; one who declares Rule B writes 11 for +22; and only 5 devices, worth +5 words, are in both renderings. The two renderings of this chapter differ at 19 of the 24 licensed places — four fifths of the ornament in the English changes with the rule, and the total length barely moves.

4. The plain arm is not device-free, and here is where it is not. At [26] the Arabic «آباء وأمهات» is a NONE place under both rules, and there is no way to write fathers and mothers in English without a rhyme on ‑thers. The same holds, more weakly, at wrong and enmity [2] and injustice and oppression [30]. Three residual devices at NONE places, all of them forced by English and none of them chosen, are recorded here rather than left for a study limb to find — RS-20260816c §7.2 measured a plain arm at 0.389 on exactly this and it was the most useful number on the page.

5. Translator's log — decisions

Frozen before any evaluation of this translation was designed (charter §3, A4). Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. D items are rendering decisions; E items are figure answers whose execution is worth recording.

5.1 Rendering decisions

• D1 — the two rules were written before the Arabic was read for figures, and the enumeration was done twice, separately. Rule A's pass was made first, in copy-text order, without looking ahead to Rule B; Rule B's pass was made second, over the same 37 sentences, and the tags in §3 were computed from the two lists afterwards. The obvious contamination is that one hand made both passes and knew what the second was for. It is stated here because it cannot be removed from this rendering, only from a successor's.
• D2 — الإسوار is the horseman, not the hunter or the archer. Witness 2's marginal gloss is «قائد الفرس», a commander of horse; the word is Persian aswār, a mounted noble. Knatchbull's chapter title — known before it was opened, from the heading list alone — is The Lioness and the Horseman, which is a convergence and not a borrowing: the gloss decided it.
• D3 — الشغبر is the jackal. The copy-text glosses it nowhere; the chapter heading in the earlier chapter list has «الشغبر الناسك وهو ابن آوى», the jackal, which is ibn āwā. Witness 2's optical damage prints it as الشعبر throughout and that is not a variant (collation §3.1).
• D4 — الورشان is the ring-dove. Witness 2 glosses «طائر شبه الحمامة», a bird like a dove. Wood-pigeon was the alternative; ring-dove was chosen because the bird speaks as the owner of the thicket and the more particular name carries that better.
• D5 — «اضطربت ظهراً لبطن» is she writhed belly over back. The idiom is literally back for belly. English has no idiom here; the literal inversion was kept because the sentence is the hinge of the tale and a paraphrase (she was beside herself) loses the body.
• D6 — بالعراء is on the open ground. Witness 2's gloss «الفضاء لا يستر فيه شيء», open space where nothing is covered: the point is the exposure of the bodies, not the place.
• D7 — the two tellings of the killing [7] and [13] are kept near-identical in English, as they are in the Arabic — the lioness repeats the narrator's own clause almost verbatim, with flung out on the open ground replacing rode off with them to his house. This is a figure of the chapter and neither rule admits it (both require adjacency), so it is not in §3 and gets no device beyond what F5 and F7 already carry. Recorded because a reader will see it and it was a decision, not an accident.
• D8 — «فلما رأى ذلك ورشان … قال لها» is rendered as one period, joining [31] and [32]. The copy-text's full stop after «وكان عيشه من الثمار» orphans a فلما with no apodosis and witness 2 has the same damage; see collation §2.
• D9 — «ما لا ترضاه لنفسك لا تصنعه لغيرك» is what does not please you in your own case, do not do in another's case. The Golden-Rule wording (do not do unto others…) was refused: it is a quotation of a different text in English, and it would have dissolved F25's matched cola. Case … case is heavier than the Arabic and is the price of answering the ‑ك rhyme in kind.
• D10 — «فاضرب لي مثلاً» is set me a fable, as in the three earlier chapters, so the four renderings can be read together.

5.2 Figure answers worth recording

• E1 (F2, the chapter's clearest saj'). العواقب / المصائب / المعاطب is three cola on rawī ب. English has no three-member rhyme in this register that is not comic; the event … the accident … the punishment takes ‑ent three times, which is a suffix rhyme answering a root rhyme. The class of the device is not the class of the figure — an English answer to Arabic saj' will usually be a Rule-B device answering a Rule-A figure, and that is worth knowing before anyone counts classes across languages.
• E2 (F5, F7, F21, the enclitic chains). English's own enclitic is the object pronoun, and it will sit at the end of colon after colon without strain: by them … upon them … shot them … killed them. This is the closest in-kind answer in the whole rendering, and it is answering the class Rule A excludes by rule.
• E3 (F17). The three ‑ك endings are answered by three ‑ing endings: your looking … your thinking … your not knowing. Same device: a rhyme produced by a grammatical ending, not by a choice of word. It costs a word less than the plain version, which is the only device in the rendering that is cheaper than what it replaced besides F6.
• E4 (F6). She wailed and she railed. Railed is doing work: ضجّت is to clamour in complaint, and railed carries the complaint that cried out does not. The same verb at [14] («لا تضجّي») is forbear your crying, because there it is inside F8's three-member rhyme and had to end in ‑air. The one Arabic verb is rendered two ways for two different figures, and that is a real cost of R37's rule 3.
• E5 (F12). «كما تدين تدان» is the chapter's proverb and its most compressed figure: one root, active then passive, three words. As you deal, so shall you be dealt with is six words and keeps the root echo exactly. The shorter as you judge you are judged was refused because judge narrows دان, which is to requite as much as to judge.
• E6 (F13). Of requiting or of smiting answers a two-member rhyme with a two-member rhyme and a matched shape. Smiting for العقاب is a register lift; of reward or punishment was the plain form and carries the sense at the cost of the figure.
• E7 (F18). Had fruited … used to fruit … the failing of the fruit: a verb, a verb-stem and a noun off one English root, answering a verb, a verb and a noun off one Arabic root. The rendering's most exact answer, and it is licensed only by Rule B.
• E8 — what was taken out. Four devices stood in the draft at places in neither set and were removed in revision: an alliteration at «الجهالة والسفه» (folly and foolishness), a rhyme at «الجزع والضجيج» (wailing and railing, which would also have collided with F6), a matched pair at «جوراً وظلماً» (wrong and wrongdoing), and a chime at «الثمار والنسك والعبادة» (fruits and fasting and faith). The reflex is live and it was caught four times, not absent — the same honest qualification R36's §4.3 made, at a higher count.

5.3 One evaluative sentence, flagged

internal-judgment-only: the A-only devices read, to the hand that wrote them, as the more mechanical half of the rendering — nine of the fourteen are a word repeated unchanged, and English repetition at close quarters is a stronger effect than Arabic repetition at close quarters, so answering them in kind may be over-answering. This is a hypothesis about the study limb's outcome and it is written here, before the design, so that it can be wrong on the record.

6. Contamination

Measured after this rendering and its log were committed and before the study limb was designed, against Knatchbull 1819's The Lioness and the Horseman, extracted by heading offset from the archive.org scan and stored without being read.

contamination: none. The longest common run is "of the lioness the horseman and the jackal" — the chapter's own title, restated in the philosopher's frame sentence, and the same three nouns D2, D3 and D4 were settled on from witness 2's marginal glosses and the chapter heading list before the comparator existed as a file. It is not evidence of dependence; it is what two translators of the same title will write.

The measurement is a selection gate (CLAUDE.md), not a flag, and it was made after the freeze because there was nothing to measure before it. Both figures are reported, not the run alone: run length has failed as a proxy three times (RS-20260731g §4.2, notes (bcd)).

Two things this measurement does not establish, and the standing rule that follows from them (CLAUDE.md): a clean number here says nothing about the lead's independence from renderings it has not been compared against, and a lead re-rendering is not an independent second opinion — across sessions the lead matches itself at up to 37 contiguous tokens, note (bhb). Nothing in this arm's design treats this hand as an independent third translator.

6.1 What was read, and when

The comparator file was written to disk by heading offset (THE LIONESS AND THE HORSEMAN. to THE MONK AND HIS GUEST.) from the archive.org plain text, and the only Knatchbull text this session has seen is the list of chapter headings used to locate the offsets. The prose is unopened. wiki/base/consulted.md is not touched: the 1819 volume is public domain.

7. Lineage and pointers

• Regime: ../../../regimes/R37-declared-rule.md
• Copy-text and collation: ../copy-text-adopted.txt, ../collation.md
• Sibling renderings of this work: ../../kalila-saih/R30-v1, ../../kalila-nasik/R34-v1, ../../kalila-ibn-urs/R36-v1
• The result that made this rendering necessary: RS-20260816c-checked-ornament
• Arm: ARM-invented-ornament, step 2