Repository path: workshop/translations/kalila-saih/R30-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-kalila-saih-R30-v1 — «باب السائح والصائغ» (Kalīla wa-Dimna), rendered whole under R30 sound-plain

Work. ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (d. c. 757), «كليلة ودمنة» — the chapter «باب السائح والصائغ», The Traveller and the Goldsmith. The project's second Arabic work and its first work of classical Arabic art-prose with a named author.

Copy-text. Arabic Wikisource, كليلة ودمنة/باب السائح والصائغ, retrieved 2026-08-16; source-wikisource-saih.txt, 998 words of body text in 60 sentences. Collated whole against a second witness — the Wikisource transcription of the Cairo Amīriyya (Būlāq) 1937 printing, pp. 301–307 — in collation.md. Two substantive readings adopted from the second witness; the rest of its 68 divergences are optical-recognition noise, listed there.

Comparator. Wyndham Knatchbull, Kalila and Dimna, or The Fables of Bidpai, Oxford 1819, ch. XVII, pp. 348–354 (archive.org kalilaanddimnao00almgoog), translated from de Sacy's Arabic. Not opened until this rendering and its log were committed. Contamination measured after the freeze and before any evaluation was designed: contamination: none — see §4.

Regime. R30 sound-plain (../../regimes/R30-sound-plain.md): render sense and syntax; do not put English sound-patterning anywhere, including at the places where the Arabic has it. This is a deliberately restricted regime built as the base arm of a manipulation, not as a recommendation.

Extent. The chapter whole: 998 Arabic words → 1,862 English words.

1. The translation

The Traveller and the Goldsmith

King Dabshalīm said to Baydabā the philosopher: I have heard that fable. Now set me a fable about the man who puts a kindness where it does not belong, and looks to be thanked for it.

The philosopher said: O King, the natures of created things are various. Of all that God has made in this world — whatever walks on four legs, or on two, or flies on a pair of wings — there is nothing better than man; but among men there is the upright and there is the corrupt. And there may be among the beasts and the wild animals and the birds one that is more faithful to an obligation than he is, more stout in defending what is in its keeping, more grateful for a kindness, and more constant in repaying it. Men of understanding, therefore, kings and others, are bound to put their kindness in its proper place, and not to place it with one who cannot bear it, or who will not discharge the thanks for it, and not to take anyone into their favour except after knowledge of his ways and acquaintance with his fidelity, his affection, his gratitude.

Nor should they single out a kinsman for it on the ground of kinship, if he is unfit for the benefaction; nor withhold their kindness and their support from a man who is nothing to them, if he shields them with his own person and with what he can command. For such a man is then one who knows the right of what has been done for him, who renders the thanks for what has been bestowed on him, commended for the advice he gives, recognised as a man of good, honest, perceptive, inclined to what is admirable in action and in speech.

And so with everyone who is known for praiseworthy qualities and trusted for them: he is a place where a kindness may be put, and a fit object for favour and advancement. For the skilled and sensible physician cannot set about curing a sick man until he has looked at him and felt his veins and learned his constitution and the cause of his complaint; and when he knows all that as it should be known, he goes forward to the treatment.

So too the man of understanding: he ought not to choose anyone out, or take him into his confidence, except after trial. Whoever proceeds upon a reputation for fair dealing without testing it is taking a risk in the matter, and stands within sight of ruin and loss.

And yet a man may sometimes do a kindness to a weak creature whose gratitude he has never tested and whose disposition he does not know, and that creature will discharge the thanks for it and repay him in the handsomest way. And a wise man may sometimes be wary of people and trust none of them with himself. A man may take up a weasel and put it into one sleeve and bring it out at the other, in the way one carries a hawk on the hand: when it has caught something he has the use of it, and it is fed from the catch.

And it has been said: a man of understanding ought not to think little of anyone, small or great, whether among men or among animals; he is well advised to test them, and to make what he does for them answer to what he sees in them. There is an old fable of the sages about this.

The King said: And how was that?

The philosopher said: They say that a company of men dug a pit, and there fell into it a goldsmith, and a serpent, and a monkey, and a tiger. A traveller passed that way and stood over the pit, and he saw the man and the serpent and the tiger and the monkey; and he considered with himself and said: I can do no better work for my life to come than to deliver this man from among these enemies of his.

So he took a rope and let it down into the pit, and the monkey caught hold of it, being light, and came out. Then he let it down a second time, and the serpent wound itself about it and came out. Then he let it down a third time, and the tiger caught hold of it and he drew it out. They thanked him for what he had done for them, and said: Do not bring this man out of the pit; for there is nothing less grateful than mankind, and this man beyond the rest.

Then the monkey said to him: My home is on a mountain near a city called Nawādarkht. And the tiger said: I too am in a thicket beside that city. The serpent said: I too am in the wall of that city. If you should pass by us some day and have need of us, call out to us, and we will come to you and give you a return for the kindness you have done us.

The traveller paid no attention to what they had told him about how little gratitude is in man; he let the rope down and brought out the goldsmith, who bowed down before him and said: You have done me a kindness. If ever you come to the city of Nawādarkht, ask for my house; I am a goldsmith, and perhaps I shall be able to repay you for what you have done for me. Then he went off to his city, and the traveller went off his own way.

It happened afterwards that the traveller had business in that city, and he set out; and the monkey met him and bowed down before him and kissed his feet, and excused himself, saying: Monkeys own nothing; but sit here until I come back to you. And the monkey went off and brought him good fruit and set it before him, and he ate as much of it as he wanted.

Then the traveller went on until he came near the gate of the city, and the tiger met him and fell down before him and said: You have done me a kindness. Rest a while until I come back to you. And the tiger went off and got in through a wall to the king's daughter and killed her and took her jewels and brought them to him, without the traveller's knowing where they came from.

He said to himself: These animals have made me this return; what then if I go to the goldsmith? If he is a poor man with nothing of his own, he will sell these jewels and get the price of them; he will give me a share of it and keep some for himself, and he knows their value better than I do.

So the traveller went and came to the goldsmith. When the goldsmith saw him he welcomed him and brought him into his house; and when he caught sight of the jewels he had with him, he knew them, for he was the man who had made them for the king's daughter. He said to the traveller: Sit and rest until I bring you food; what is in the house is not good enough for you. Then he went out, saying to himself: I have got my chance. I will go to the king and inform him of this, and my standing with him will improve.

So he went to the king's gate and sent word in to him: The man who killed your daughter and took her jewels is with me. The king sent and had the traveller brought; and when he saw the jewels on him he gave him no respite, but ordered that he be tortured and paraded through the city and crucified.

When they had done this to him, the traveller began to weep and to say at the top of his voice: If I had obeyed the monkey and the serpent and the tiger in what they enjoined on me, and in what they told me about how little gratitude is in man, my case would not have come to this affliction. And he said it over and over.

The serpent heard him saying it and came out of her hole and knew him; and his case weighed on her, and she set about contriving his release. She went and bit the king's son; and the king called in the learned men, and they said charms over him to heal him, and were of no use to him at all. Then the serpent went to a sister of hers among the jinn and told her what kindness the traveller had done her, and what he had fallen into. She was moved for him, and went to the king's son and appeared to him in a vision, and said: You will not be cured until this man whom you have punished unjustly says the charm over you.

And the serpent went to the traveller and came in to him in the prison and said: This is the thing I warned you against — doing a kindness to this human being — and you would not obey me. And she brought him a leaf that is good against her venom, and said: When they bring you to say the charm over the king's son, give him water in which this leaf has steeped, and he will be cured. And when the king asks you about your case, tell him the truth; and you will come through it, if God most high wills.

Now the king's son told the king that he had heard a speaker say: You will not be cured until this traveller who has been imprisoned unjustly says the charm over you. So the king called for the traveller and ordered him to say the charm over his son. He said: I am no good at charms; but give him water from this tree to drink, and he will be cured by God's leave. He gave it to him, and the boy was cured.

The king was glad of it, and asked him for his story, and he told it. The king thanked him and gave him a handsome gift, and ordered the goldsmith crucified. So they crucified him, for his lying, and his turning aside from gratitude, and his repayment of a good action with an evil one.

Then the philosopher said to the king: In what the goldsmith did to the traveller, and his thanklessness to him after being rescued by him, and the animals' gratitude to him, and the deliverance of him by one of them — in this there is an example for anyone who will learn from it, and a subject of reflection for the thoughtful, and an instruction in the placing of kindness and benefaction with people of fidelity and generosity, near or far; for in that lie soundness of judgement, the drawing on of good, and the turning away of harm.

2. Translator's log — decisions

Frozen with the rendering. Decisions and alternatives; no quality claims.

D1 Copy-text and second witness. The Wikisource plain text is unvocalised and carries no edition statement; the Amīriyya 1937 transcription is vocalised and page-anchored but its optical recognition is heavily damaged (ج→ح, غ→ع, ب→ي throughout). I read the plain text as copy-text and the 1937 as a check on it. Two substantive adoptions: الطبيب for the copy-text's الطيب ("the physician", not "the good man" — the clause is about curing a patient), and فدعا for فدعى. collation.md has the rest.

D2 The chapter's title pair is a figure and is not localisable. السائح / الصائغ — sāʾiḥ / ṣāʾigh — are the same morphological pattern differing in two consonants, and the pair recurs whenever either man is named, forty-odd times. English traveller / goldsmith has nothing of it. I record it and exclude it from the figure inventory in §3, because it is a property of the whole text and cannot be cut to a locus. Nothing was done to compensate for it.

D3 R30's restriction, and what it costs. The regime forbids English sound-patterning anywhere. Four places wanted it and did not get it: fine action / foul one for الفعل الجميل بالقبيح (written a good action with an evil one); give me part and take part for فيعطيني بعضه ويأخذ بعضه (written give me a share of it and keep some for himself); praised for his counsel, known for his goodness for محموداً بالنصح معروفاً بالخير (written commended for the advice he gives, recognised as a man of good); and a lesson for whoever takes it, a thought for whoever thinks for عبرة لمن اعتبر وفكرة لمن تفكر (written an example for anyone who will learn from it, and a subject of reflection for the thoughtful). All four are recorded here because the manipulated arm of the study limb will put them back, and the record shows the option was live at translation time and refused by the regime rather than never seen.

D4 One figure crosses into plain English for free and is therefore not manipulable. أوفى … وأشد … وأشكر … وأقوم is four elatives in a row; English has comparative anaphora natively, and more faithful … more stout … more grateful … more constant reproduces the pattern without any choice being made about sound. It is enumerated in §3 as F1 and marked free-crossing; it is excluded from the manipulated set by the rule in §3, and the exclusion is declared here, before the study limb exists.

D5 ببر. Tiger, with leopard the live alternative; the animal is the Indic tiger of the Panchatantra line and Knatchbull, unseen at this point, was later found to have tiger too.

D6 رقى / يرقي. The verb is to recite a charm over a sick person. English has no single verb; charm as a transitive verb reads as enchantment of the wrong kind. Rendered periphrastically — say the charm over him — at every occurrence, which costs the source's compactness and one repetition-effect across four sentences.

D7 معروف. The chapter's key word, some fourteen occurrences: a kindness done, a benefaction, a good turn, and in the closing sentence something nearer good works. Held to kindness wherever the object is a deed done to someone, and let go to benefaction only in the two abstract legal clauses; the alternative — one English word throughout — makes the closing sentence unidiomatic.

D8 The frame's addressee shifts. The philosopher's discourse moves between the plural (يضعوا، يمنعوا — kings and others) and the singular gnomic (العاقل). Kept as it stands rather than levelled to one number; the shift is audible in the Arabic and is not a device.

D9 فشكرن … وقلن. The three animals are referred to with the feminine plural, the ordinary Arabic concord for non-human plurals; nothing in English marks it and nothing was attempted.

D10 أقل شكراً من الناس ثم هذا الرجل خاصةً. Nothing less grateful than mankind, and this man beyond the rest — the second clause is an anacoluthon in the Arabic (ثم with no verb) and I kept it as a broken-off apposition rather than smoothing it into especially this one.

D11 مشرفاً على هلاك وفساد. مشرف على is to be on the brink of, looking down on, as one looks down into the pit the fable is about to dig — stands within sight of ruin and loss keeps the sightline. The abstract pair هلاك وفساد is two words of the same measure; under R30 they get ruin and loss, which is not a matched pair in English.

D12 Sentence 60's three genitives. صواب الرأي وجلب الخير وصرف المكروه — soundness of judgement, the drawing on of good, and the turning away of harm. The Arabic's three constructs are of one shape; the English keeps the syntactic parallel and, under R30, no sound.

D13 What is not in this rendering. No paragraph divisions exist in the copy-text; the eighteen paragraphs above are mine, made at speech boundaries and at the frame's two hinges. No section heading was supplied at They say that a company of men dug a pit, where the fable proper begins.

3. The Arabic's sound figures, enumerated before any English was written

The rule, stated before the count and applied to the whole chapter. 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. This is the rule of E-20260815 §2, imported so that the two chapters are counted the same way.

Exclusions, published so the enumeration can be tested. (a) Rhyme produced solely by an identical enclitic pronoun (-هُ، -ها) is not admitted; it is grammatical agreement and it is everywhere in this prose. (b) The cognate figure (root echo between verb and its object or adjunct) is a separate class and is not counted here, as at E-20260815. (c) Repetition of a high-frequency narrative verb across sentences (انطلق, twenty-two occurrences) is not a chosen figure. (d) Repetition of a whole clause as a narrative formula (ثم دلاه ثانية … ثم دلاه ثالثاً) is structural, not a sound figure. (e) The title pair السائح / الصائغ is a figure but is not localisable (D2).

Fourteen loci admitted, in copy-text order. Sentence numbers are those of ../collation.md §2.

Density. Fourteen loci in 998 words. Eleven of the fourteen fall in the philosopher's frame discourse (sentences 1–14 and 59–60, 407 words) and three in the narrative (sentences 15–58, 591 words) — a rate of one per 37 words against one per 197. The chapter's sound-work is where its argument is, not where its story is.

The manipulable set, fixed here by rule. A locus is manipulable if the R30 rendering above carries no English sound device at it, so that an arm which adds one differs from R30 at that place and nowhere else. F1 is excluded by D4 as free-crossing. The remaining thirteen — F2–F14 — are manipulable. No selection among them has been made at the time of this freeze.

4. Contamination

contamination: none. Measured with tools/dependence_check.py after this file and its log were committed and before the study limb was designed, against Knatchbull 1819 ch. XVII, the only freely reachable published English of this chapter.

Raw output in ../dependence.json. The measurement is a selection gate (CLAUDE.md), not a flag: it was taken before any locus was selected for the study limb.

The eleven-token run is worth printing rather than summarising: "the traveller paid no attention to what they had told him". It is the project's standing lesson that run length alone is a poor proxy — twenty-one shared 7-grams with zero 12-grams is the profile of two hands rendering the same simple narrative clause, not of one hand having seen the other. Knatchbull is also translating a fuller recension: 1,768 words of English against this rendering's 1,860 on an Arabic a third shorter than his, with whole sententious passages present in his text and absent from this copy-text.

5. Lineage and pointers

• Regime: ../../regimes/R30-sound-plain.md
• Collation: ../collation.md
• Arm: ../../../wiki/arms/ARM-answering-figure.md
• Evaluation: filed at ../../experiments/E-20260816-answering-figure/; no evaluation of this rendering was designed before this page was committed.