Repository path: workshop/translations/maqamat-dimyat/R53-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

«المقامة الدمياطية» — al-Ḥarīrī's fourth Assembly, whole, R53 v1

Source. أبو محمد القاسم بن علي الحريري (Basra, 1054–1122), «المقامات», المقامة الرابعة، الدمياطية. Copy-text, provenance and its single-witness declaration: ../collation.md. Stored source: ../source-arwikisource-maqama4.txt. The whole maqāma — 182 prose cola and 14 verse bayts, 749 Arabic tokens (607 of them prose).

Why this maqāma and why now. ARM-balanced-period step 2 measures Chappelow 1767, the other translator in A-hariri-hands who printed a policy. His declared policy is a refusal of the rhyme; his page carries a second policy he never states, which is that he unpacks the commentary into the running text. R53 is that page-policy made explicit, and this rendering is a hand executing it on purpose, so that the shape of the thing done deliberately can be set beside the shape of the thing done in 1767 — exactly as R50 did for Preston's printed prescription.

Assembly IV was chosen over Assembly III for a contamination reason and it is the only reason. The lead had read roughly seventy words of Chappelow's Assembly IV — the frame opening — while establishing which maqāmāt the 1767 volume contains, and had read about six hundred words of his Assembly III in the same check. Six hundred words of a published rendering is priming; seventy is declarable. Both are declared, and §Contamination measures what the seventy did.

Regime. R53 the note in the text — ../../regimes/R53-note-in-the-text.md. Running prose; no lineation; the rhyme neither sought nor refused; and, where an English reader cannot take the colon without a note, the note goes inside the sentence. The rule says nothing about clause length or about the balance of neighbouring clauses, and nothing about the syntactic form the unpacking takes — see the regime page §What the rule deliberately does not say for why that silence is load-bearing.

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 rendering. The lead does not judge it.

Contamination: declared suspected, measured, and below the two published hands' overlap with each other

The three published Assembly IV texts were located in the volume OCRs by running-header line number alone and sliced by slice.py, which printed only line and token counts. None was opened before this rendering was finished and frozen; they were then passed to tools/dependence_check.py as paths and only its statistics were read.

The declaration stays suspected and not none, because the seventy words were read and a measurement of copying is not a measurement of priming. What the measurement says is that the seventy words left no copied string: the lead's overlap with Chappelow is the lowest of the six pairs, and the two published hands overlap each other more than the lead overlaps any of them.

The rendering

Al-Ḥārith son of Hammām gave us this account. He said: I went down to Damietta, on the Egyptian coast, in one of those years that people afterwards name for the shoving and shouting that filled them. I was in those days a man others watched with envy for the ease he lived in and liked for the friendship he gave: I went about trailing the long bordered mantles that only money buys, and prosperity was unveiled to me as a bride is unveiled to her husband. I fell in with a party of travellers who had broken across their knee the stick that quarrels are made of, and had been suckled all together on the milk of agreement, until they stood as even as the teeth of a comb and were as single in what they wanted as one soul in one body. For all that, we travelled fast. We would mount nothing but a headlong she-camel, the kind that goes as though the wind were behind her; and when we halted at a stage, or came down to a well, we stole our rest rather than took it, and never let the halt grow long. So it came into our heads to put the beasts to the road again on a night that was still in its youth and black as a raven's skin; and we rode on through it until the night stripped that youth off, and the morning wiped away the dye it had been painted with. When we had wearied of the night march and were leaning towards sleep, we came upon ground whose low hills were still wet and whose east wind came over them faint and ailing, and we chose it for the camels to kneel in and for ourselves to lie down in until daylight. And when the whole mixed company had settled there, and the creaking of the saddle-frames and the snoring of the men had died away together, I heard one of them, a man with a carrying voice, say to the friend he shared the night's talk with, over among the baggage: What is your rule of conduct with your own generation, and with the people who live next to you?

He said: I keep faith with my neighbour, even when my neighbour is the one doing the wrong. I give my company freely to the man who has just sprung at me. I put up with the man I share my food with, even when everything about him is muddle. I love the man who is closest to me even when what he holds to my lips is a cup of scalding water. I rank the man who is tender towards me above my own brother. I keep faith with a companion though he does not pay me back a tenth of what I have laid out. I count a large present a small thing when it is going to a guest, and I bury the man who rides at my side under kindnesses. I seat the man who talks my nights away in the place I would give a prince, and I put my familiar where my chief would sit. I lay my good turns up with my acquaintances as a man lays up a deposit, and I make over to whoever travels with me whatever I have that makes travelling easier. I keep my speech soft for the man who detests me, and I go on asking after the man who has forgotten that I exist. Where faith is concerned I am content with the scrapings of it, and where repayment is concerned with the smallest part of it. I do not cry out at injustice when I am the one it is done to, and I take no revenge — not if the spotted snake has had its teeth in me.

His companion said to him: Out on you, boy. A man is only close-fisted about what is worth being close-fisted about, and men only bid against one another for what has a price on it. Now I go to no man who does not come to me. I do not lay my regard on the insolent, as a brand is laid on a camel's flank. I keep no clear water between myself and a man who refuses me fair dealing. I take no man for a brother who cuts the loops his own tether is fastened by. I do not take the part of a man who disappoints what I hope from him, and I spare no thought for the man who has cut my ropes. I do not humour anyone who has failed to grasp what I am worth, and I do not put my halter into the hand of a man who breaks the protection he has promised me. I do not spend my affection on my adversaries, nor do I give up threatening the man who behaves as my enemy. I plant no good turns in enemy ground. I am not free with my help to a man who is glad when things go badly for me, and I see no reason to turn my head towards one who would be pleased to hear that I was dead. I single out nobody but the people I love for a gift, and I look for a cure for my sickness nowhere but among my friends. I do not make over the freehold of my friendship to a man who will not stop a gap for me. I do not clear my intentions for someone who is hoping to hear of my death. I do not put my whole heart into a prayer for a man who never fills a vessel of mine, and I do not pour out praise on a man who empties my bowl.

And who was it that ruled I should give and you should hoard, that I should be soft and you rough, that I should melt and you stay frozen, that I should burn up and you go out? Nobody ruled it, by God. Rather let the two of us weigh even in what we say, as exactly as the little brass weight the goldsmith sets in his scale, and match one another in what we do as one sandal matches the other, so that neither of us need fear being got the better of and both of us are spared the grudge that comes afterwards. Otherwise — what are the two of us doing giving one another a second cup at all, when I carry you and you find me a light thing to carry, when I put myself out to earn for you and you cut me, when I go out to meet you and you send me away? How is fair dealing to be got out of a man by pressing him? When did a sun ever shine through cloud? When was affection ever made to keep company with a high hand? And what free man ever agreed to a bargain that had his own humiliation written into it? God bless your father — for this is what your father says:

I have repaid the man who fastened his love on me as a man is repaid who builds on his own foundations. I have measured out to my friend as he measured to me, whether the measure he gave was full or short. I did not cheat him of it. The worst of men is the man whose today is a poorer thing than his yesterday. Every man who comes to me looking for fruit gets nothing from me but the fruit of his own planting. I do not set out to overreach, and I do not come away with the bargain of a man whose wits have been taken from him. I do not hold a claim to be owing to the man who holds no claim to be owing from himself. Many a one with the taste of fondness still on his lips took me for a man who would deal truly with him under his disguise, and did not know, being ignorant, that I pay my debtor back in the coin he lent me. So cut the man who takes you for a fool, cut him in loathing, and reckon him a man already laid in his grave; and for the man whose friendship has something doubtful in it, put on the face of one who wants no part of his company; and hope for no affection from a man who thinks that you are in need of his penny.

Al-Ḥārith son of Hammām said: When I had taken in everything that passed between them, I wanted badly to know who the two of them were. So when the dawn came up — the sun's own child, as the Arabs name it — and the light had covered the whole sky like a blanket pulled over it, I was out before the beasts were on their feet, out before the crow, quartering the ground in the direction the voice had come from in the night and reading the faces I passed with a clear eye. At last I caught sight of Abū Zayd and his son talking together with a pair of worn-out mantles over them, and I knew that these were the two who had whispered through my night, and the source my story would have to be traced back to. I went to them as a man taken with their easy manners and sorry for their rags, and I told them they were free to move their things across to mine and to dispose of everything I had, the much of it and the little. Then I set about passing their merits round the caravan and shaking the fruiting branches over their heads, until they were buried in presents and had been taken up as friends.

We were camped for the night where we could make out the buildings of the villages and see the fires of hospitality burning in them. And when Abū Zayd saw his purse full and his poverty cleared off him, he said to me: My body has got filthy and the grime has set in it. Will you give me leave to make for a village and wash, and get this necessary thing done? I said: If you must — but quickly, quickly; and back again, back again. He said: You will find me on top of you again sooner than your own glance comes back to you. Then he was off at the stretch of a racehorse down the course, calling to his son: Hurry, hurry! It did not enter our heads that he had cheated us and was running for it, so we sat on watching for him the way people watch for the feast-days, and sending out scouts and riders to look for him, until the day had grown old and the bank it stood on was ready to fall in. And when the waiting had gone on and on, and the sun was showing through in rags, I said to my companions: We have gone to the far end of our patience and let this halt drag until we have thrown the time away, and it is plain the man has lied to us. Get ready to move. Do not hang about over grass that grows on a dunghill.

I got up to put the saddle on my camel and load for the road, and I found that Abū Zayd had written on the saddle-frame:

You who became an arm to me, and a helper such as no other man was — do not suppose that I went away from you out of weariness, or out of insolence. It is only that I have always been one of those who, once he has fed, is off.

He said: I read the saddle-frame out to the whole company, so that anyone who had blamed him might have his excuse; and they were delighted with his fable and prayed to be kept out of the way of his mischief. Then we moved on, and never learned who he took in exchange for us.

Translator's log — frozen 2026-08-27, before any evaluation of this rendering was designed

Decisions and alternatives. No quality claim is made here; any evaluative sentence would carry internal-judgment-only and none is intended.

D1 — the register, which R53 does not specify

R53 carries Chappelow's page-policy and not his English. His prose is 1767 prose. I did not imitate it, because an arm that is identifiable on sight destroys any blind comparison it enters — the same constraint R50 records under §What R50 does not carry. The rendering is in plain modern literary English. This is a declared deviation from the historical hand and it is the largest one.

D2 — what "the note goes into the text" was taken to mean

Rule 4 was applied to sense, not to the Arabic as an object. Where a colon needed a gloss, the gloss went in as part of what the sentence says. Where the difficulty was metalinguistic — a pun, a sound figure, a word doing two jobs — nothing was put in the text about it, because a sentence telling the reader what the Arabic sounds like is a note about the original and not an unpacking of the sense. Chappelow's own practice is the warrant: his remark about the two Arabic words that "correspond in sound" is in his notes, not in his text.

The consequence is that the three puns in this maqāma are simply lost, and are logged as lost: p039/p040 حميم, the intimate friend and the boiling water, one word twice; p100/p101 خُلّة / خَلّة, friendship and the gap in a wall; p146/p147 القُرَى / القِرَى, the villages and the entertainment of guests.

D3 — the twenty-three unpackings

Every place where matter was put into the sentence under rule 4, with what went in:

Twenty-three sites in 182 cola. Nineteen of them are inside the sentence the colon already made; four (p002, p012, p073, p128) required a clause of their own.

D4 — the two speeches, which are the body of the maqāma

p033–p068 and p069–p125 are 36 and 57 cola of very short, densely rhymed members — many of them two or three words. In running prose they cannot stay separate sentences without producing a list, so they were grouped: the first speech became twelve English sentences from thirty-six cola, the second twenty-one from fifty-seven. This grouping is a consequence of rule 5 (running prose) and was not chosen for any property of length or balance, which the rule does not mention. It is recorded here because it is the single largest structural decision in the rendering and anything measured about clause counts will be downstream of it.

D5 — three places where the copy-text is doubtful

• p116 «حتى نأَنَ التّغابُنَ» — read as نأمَنَ, "so that we may be safe from being got the better of". The copy-text's form is not a word I can construe.
• p118 «أعُلّكَ وتُعلّني» — both verbs are the same, which breaks the pattern of the three pairs that follow it (p119–p121), where the speaker does a good turn and the addressee returns an ill one. Rendered as a genuine reciprocal — "what are the two of us doing giving one another a second cup at all" — with the imbalance carried by the three that follow. A different reading of this colon would change the sentence and not the paragraph.
• p125 «ولله أبوك حيث يقول» — the second speaker is the first speaker's father (p069, يا بُنيّ), so the idiom of praise is the father praising himself before reciting. Rendered so as to keep that: "God bless your father — for this is what your father says".

D6 — the verse

Rule 6: unrhymed English lines, one per Arabic hemistich. The first poem is eleven bayts on a single rhyme in ‑سِهِ, the second three bayts in ‑شَرْ; neither monorhyme is attempted, and the English runs as unrhymed lines of loose length. b013's Arabic breaks the word نأيتُك across the two hemistichs — a formal joke that does not survive; the English simply reads through it.

D7 — what was hardest

The second speech. Fifty-seven cola of negation in a fixed frame — I do not X the man who Y — is, in Arabic, held together by the rhyme; take the rhyme away, as rule 3 requires, and what is left in English is a paragraph of near-identical clauses whose only variation is the verb. I did not vary the frame to relieve it, because rule 2 forbids adding, and rule 3 forbids reaching for the sound that was doing the work. That is the cost of Chappelow's declared refusal, paid on the page rather than described, and it is what this rendering has to show for having taken his policy seriously.