Repository path: workshop/translations/maqamat-hulwan/R48-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

«المقامة الحلوانية» — al-Ḥarīrī's second Assembly, whole, R48 v1: the rhyme first

Source. أبو محمد القاسم بن علي الحريري (Basra, 1054–1122), «المقامات», المقامة الثانية، الحلوانية. Copy-text and provenance: ../collation.md. Loci enumerated by script and frozen before a word of this English existed: ../loci-frozen.md — 58 loci over 134 of the 140 prose cola.

Span. The whole maqāma — 140 prose cola and 17 verse lines, 709 Arabic tokens → 1,179 English words of prose.

Regime. R48 the rhyme first — ../../regimes/R48-rhyme-first.md, unchanged. Prose stays prose; the sense outranks the sound; and at every frozen saj' locus the hand delivers a chime at the colon end if rule 2 permits one, released from R43's requirement that both members be the ordinary rendering of their bearer. It may take a less ordinary but still faithful word, invert a clause, and lengthen or shorten a colon. What it may not do is change what the colon says.

Why this artifact exists. Two of the three published English hands on the shelf print a refusal to carry al-Ḥarīrī's rhyme, and both give a reason about the reader — Chappelow 1767, "a piece of pedantry"; Preston 1850, "extremely ungraceful in English, and introduces an air of flippancy" (wiki/base/anchors/A-hariri-hands/README.md §3). R48 on Assembly I made the object those reasons are about. This is the second execution of that regime, on a maqāma it was not designed against, so that ARM-worth-paying step 2 can register its statistic on material the step-1 hypotheses were not formed on.

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.

The verse is carried from T-maqamat-hulwan-R50-v1 unchanged, as it is in the R43 arm, and every study segment excludes it.

Contamination

none against every published hand, measured. Preston 1850 and Chenery 1867 were passed to tools/dependence_check.py as paths; only its statistics were read, and neither file has been opened by this hand.

RHY has the lowest overlap with Preston of anything this project has measured on this text — zero shared 7-grams and a longest run of five. That is not a virtue; it is what happens when a hand is under a rule the other hand printed a refusal of.

The RHY ~ ORD figure is by construction and is not a defect. R48 is R43 with a chime delivered at the loci: outside the loci the two arms are meant to be the same English, and the 87-token identical run is the stretch p068–p078 where four consecutive loci were graded UNAVAILABLE or AVAILABLE-REFUSED in this arm and nothing changed. The consequence for any study using both is stated on the R43 page and taken in E-20260827b's design: a study segment must contain loci at which the arms in fact differ, or it is a near-duplicate control.

The rendering

The prose, one record per colon and beside the other two arms, is ../cola.tsv, frozen with this page.

The opening, in the three arms — p001/p002, «كلِفْتُ مُذْ ميطَتْ عني التّمائِمُ. ونِيطَتْ بيَ العَمائِمُ»:

Compliance with the regime, measured

../build_cola.py, run before any study using these texts was designed.

Assembly I's R48 reached 33 STRICT and 4 IDENTICAL over 65 loci. This one reaches 26 STRICT and no identical bearers at all, over 58. The identical-bearer count is the one the hand watched: an IDENTICAL colon-end pair is a chime bought by repeating a word, which is the cheapest and worst kind, and Assembly I bought four.

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

Decisions and alternatives. Not quality claims.

1. What the released rule actually buys, stated concretely. R43 on this same Arabic reached a chime at 10 loci of 58. R48, differing only in that it may choose a less ordinary word and invert a clause, reaches 42. The whole of that gap is syntax, not vocabulary — over and over the ordinary English rendering has the chiming word available but in the wrong place, and the only work R48 does is move it to the end. S025 is the type case: the Arabic pairs two adjectives, English says a shaggy beard and a shabby look with the noun last, and R48 writes a beard that was shaggy ⁄ a look about him that was shabby. Nothing about the words changed. The price of a prose chime in English is a marked word order, and this rendering pays it 42 times.

2. Three chimes were reachable and were refused, with the pair quoted and the ground given (R48 rule 6).

3. Where the chime was taken and the word moved furthest. Four cases are worth the record because they are the ones a reader could object to, and they are declared rather than buried:

• p084 complete — استملاه is to ask for dictation, i.e. to take a thing down in full; had it down complete carries the fullness and adds an adverb the Arabic implies rather than states.
• p096 skin — وصم is a brand or scar; a brand might be set upon his skin makes the surface explicit so that the three-deep in ⁄ skin ⁄ sin chain could carry the Qur'anic tag at p097. The only three-deep chime in this rendering, and it cost a noun.
• p137 array — حلية is outward form or aspect; array leans toward dress. The pair grey ⁄ array is a full rhyme and the lean is real; it is logged, not defended.
• p124/p125 handsome ⁄ winsome — جمّل is to make beautiful, and winsome leans toward charming. Same class of small drift as array.

4. What refusing to add showed about the eight-deep run. S020 is the longest run in the maqāma: al-Ḥarīrī rhymes eight consecutive cola on -āq, and the fourth and fifth of them are the pun العُراق ⁄ العِراق, a meaty bone against Iraq. English reached two two-deep chimes inside those eight cola — destitution ⁄ separation and away ⁄ lay — and the pun-bearing pair was not among them, because every rhyme available at Iraq required inventing a phrase. A run that is eight deep in Arabic comes into English as two couplets and a gap, and the gap falls exactly where the Arabic is cleverest. This is the same shape RS-20260823-run-depth found in Persian at depth four, on a different author in a different language.

5. What was given up, listed. The saj' at 16 of 58 loci. The jinās at p025 and p047, including the ʿurāq ⁄ ʿIrāq pun. The intra-colon rhyme at p068. The Arabic's run depth everywhere: the deepest chain here is three (p095–p097) against the source's eight. Nothing was added: no fact, event, or referent the Arabic does not carry, and the four places where a word leans are listed in §3 rather than left for a reader to find.