Repository path: workshop/translations/maqamat-sanaa/R43-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

«المقامة الصنعانية» — al-Ḥarīrī's first Assembly, whole, R43 v1

Source. أبو محمد القاسم بن علي الحريري (Basra, 1054–1122), «المقامات», المقامة الأولى, الصنعانية. Copy-text, provenance and its single-witness declaration: ../collation.md. Stored source: ../source-arwikisource-maqama1.txt.

Span. The whole maqāma — 148 blocks, 139 prose cola and 9 verse lines, 590 Arabic tokens. The project's first maqāma, and its second Arabic work after «ألف ليلة وليلة». Al-Ḥarīrī's fifty Assemblies are the canonical monument of سجع (saj', rhymed prose): 137 of the 139 cola of this one stand inside a rhyme figure, and the six words that do not are «ثمّ أنْشَدَ:» and «أنْشَد:» — then he recited.

Regime. R43 the prose holds — ../../regimes/R43-prose-holds.md. Prose stays prose and verse stays verse; at every frozen saj' locus a chime is attempted and the attempt is graded TAKEN / AVAILABLE-REFUSED / UNAVAILABLE, with a separate VERSE-WOULD-SOLVE flag; every verse line is graded by tools/rhyme_pairs.py after the hand has written its own reading down.

R43 is used on a second language for the first time. It was written for Persian and its text says Persian throughout; nothing in its five substantive rules is Persian-specific, and the one place it had to be read across is rule 5, which speaks of the bayt: al-Ḥarīrī's verse is mono-rhymed and not a self-rhyming couplet, so the unit graded here is the line, and R42 rule 4 — do not attempt the source's run length — is carried over unchanged and is why the English below rhymes in couplets where the Arabic runs six deep. This is recorded as a regime finding, not smuggled through.

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 before the freeze, measured clean after it

1. The work is a monument and its English is old. Chappelow 1767, Preston 1850, Chenery 1867 and Steingass 1898 are all public domain and all almost certainly in the lead's training data, and the Ṣan'ā Assembly is the one anthologised piece of the fifty.
2. The declared priming is four lines and is stated in full (../loci-frozen.md §7): while establishing that three hands were reachable at all, the lead saw one line of Preston and three of Chenery, touching S01, S02, S57. Nothing of Chappelow was seen. Those three loci are marked PRIMED below, and the study reports its primary both with and without them.
3. No published rendering of this maqāma was opened before this page and its log were frozen.
4. The declaration is suspected and not high because the priming is four lines rather than a whole tale — and it is not none because clause 1 stands. It is measured after the freeze, against all three hands, and the measurement is reported on the study's result page whatever it says.
5. MEASURED 2026-08-24, after this log was frozen: clean against all three hands. Longest common run 6 tokens (Chappelow), 7 (Preston), 7 (Chenery); shared 12-grams 0 in every pair. The front-matter declaration is changed from suspected to none on that measurement, and the pre-measurement declaration is left standing above so the change is legible. Chenery and Preston share five 7-grams and an 11-token run with each other — the two published hands measure closer to one another than either does to this rendering. workshop/experiments/E-20260824b-hariri-hands/raw/dependence.json.
6. The study limb's primary does not depend on this rendering's independence. It is a census of what three printed books do. This column is reported separately, labelled, and never pooled with them.

A second declaration. The hand rendered this span holding the prediction its study limb registers about it. R43 is built so the hand cannot quietly satisfy that: rule 2 outranks rule 3, every refusal is quoted, and the grade of every chime is recorded by kind (§The log, column kind) so that a reader can discount the cheap ones without taking the hand's word for anything.

The rendering

The narrator comes to Ṣan'ā

p001. Al-Ḥārith ibn Hammām related: When I had mounted the withers of exile, and want had set me far from my age-mates, the buffetings of Time flung me — p002. to Ṣan'ā of the Yemen. p003. I entered it with my wallet spent, p004. my destitution evident, p005. owning not a mite to live on, p006. nor finding in my scrip a bite. p007. So I fell to beating her streets like one straying, p008. and to ranging her quarters with the ranging of the bird that goes thirsting; p009. and I scouted the pasture-grounds of my lookings, p010. and the walking-grounds of my mornings and my evenings, p011. for a generous man before whom I might wear threadbare my face, p012. and to whom I might open my case, p013. or a man of letters whose face would lift my heaviness, p014. and whose recital would slake my thirstiness — p015. until the end of my circuit brought me, p016. and the first of God's kindnesses guided me, p017. to a wide assembly, p018. thronged with a press of people and a wailing. p019. So I pushed into the thicket of the throng, p020. to sound out what was drawing the tears; p021. and I saw, in the heart of the ring, p022. a man slight of frame, p023. on him the gear of wayfaring, p024. and in him the ring of wailing. p025. He was stamping out rhyme-pairs with the jewels of his wording, p026. and striking the ears with the rebukes of his warning; p027. and mixed bands had ringed him round, p028. as the halo rings the moon, p029. and the sheath the fruit. p030. So I edged in to catch a light from his profit, p031. and to gather up some of his pearls; p032. and I heard him say, when he had broken into his coursing, p033. and the camel-throats of his improvising had roared:

The sermon

p034. O you that go blind in your overweening, p035. trailing the robe of your preening, p036. bolting into your fooleries, p037. sidling toward your frivolities: p038. how long will you hold to your waywardness, p039. and find sweet the pasture of your wrongfulness? p040. And till when will you go to the end of your strutting, p041. and not come to the end of your sporting? p042. You come out to duel with your rebellion p043. against the Owner of your forelock! p044. You make bold, with the foulness of your conduct, p045. against Him that knows your secret! p046. You slip out of sight of your neighbour, p047. while you stand in the eye of your Observer! p048. You steal away from your bondman, and no secret is secret from your Sovereign!

p049. Do you think your estate will profit you, p050. when the hour of your removal is come? p051. Or your wealth deliver you, p052. when your own deeds bring you down? p053. Or your ruing stand you in stead, p054. when your footing slips? p055. Or your company feel for you, p056. on the day your assembly closes about you? p057. Why have you not struck the road of your guidance, p058. nor hurried the cure of your malady, p059. nor broken the point of your violence, p060. nor curbed your soul, which is the chief of your enemies? p061. Is not death your appointment? p062. Then where is your equipment? p063. Is not the grey hair your warning? p064. Then what is your pleading? p065. Is not the grave-niche your lodging? p066. Then what is your saying? p067. Is not your journey's end with God? p068. Then who is your helper?

p069. How often has Time waked you, and you played the drowsy, p070. and preaching pulled at you, and you hung back! p071. And the lessons were made plain to you, and you played blind, p072. and the truth stood out for you, and you wrangled, p073. and death put you in mind, and you played the forgetter, p074. and it lay in your hand to comfort, and you gave no comfort! p075. You prefer a coin of your hoarding p076. to a remembrance of your heeding; p077. and you choose a palace of your rearing p078. over a kindness of your conferring; p079. and you turn from a guide you would ask of, p080. to a store you would ask of; p081. and you let the love of a garment of your coveting p082. outweigh a guerdon of your buying. p083. The rubies of largesse p084. cleave closer to your heart than the hours of prayer; p085. and outbidding in bride-gifts p086. is dearer to you than keeping up alms-gifts; p087. and platters of viands p088. are more to your appetite than the pages of the faiths; p089. and joking with your comrades p090. is better company to you than the reciting of the Qur'ān! p091. You enjoin what is right and break into its enclosure, p092. and you fence men off from what is wrong and do not fence yourself; p093. and you edge away from wrong and then walk full into it, p094. and you fear men, when God is worthier of your fear!

p095. Then he recited:

b001. Perdition to the seeker of this world, / who has poured toward her his whole inclination; b002. he never comes to his senses, for love of her / and the surfeit of his passion; b003. yet had he known it, there had been enough for him, / of all he covets, a ration.

He goes, and is followed

p096. Then he laid the dust of his storming, p097. and dried up his spouting, p098. and took his water-skin on his arm, p099. and put his cudgel under his arm-pit. p100. And when the company had turned their eyes to his girding-up, p101. and seen him ready to leave his station, p102. every man of them put his hand into his bosom, p103. and filled him a bucket out of his bounty, p104. and said: Lay this out on your keep, p105. or divide it among your company. p106. So he took it from them, his eyes lowering, p107. and turned from them, his tongue praising; p108. and he set to bidding farewell to whoever went along with him, p109. so that his road might be hidden from him, p110. and to slipping away from whoever came trailing, p111. so that none should know his dwelling.

p112. Al-Ḥārith ibn Hammām said: So I followed him, hiding from him my gazing, p113. and came after his track from where there was no seeing, p114. until he came to a cave, p115. and slid into it off his guard. p116. So I let him be till he had put off his sandals, p117. and washed his feet; p118. and then I broke in on him. p119. And I found him nose to nose with a disciple, p120. over bread of fine flour, p121. and a kid roasted in the pit, p122. and, facing the pair of them, a jar of wine. p123. So I said to him: Sir, is that your saying, p124. and this your being? p125. He heaved a sigh out of the dog-days, p126. and all but split with rage, p127. and he kept goggling at me, p128. till I feared he would spring upon me. p129. And when his burning had died down, p130. and his scorching was hidden away, p131. he recited:

b004. I put on the fine mantle to come at the sweetmeat, / and I hooked my hook into every worthless date; b005. and I made my preaching a snare, / and hunted with it the quarry and the quarry's mate; b006. and Time so drove me that I came in, / by the deftness of my wiles, on the lion in his lair; b007. for all that, I never feared its turning, / nor did a sinew of mine quiver there; b008. nor did a covetous soul bring me down / to a watering-place that would soil my name; b009. and had Time dealt justly in its judging, / it had never given rule to men of blame.

p132. Then he said to me: Come near and dine; p133. or, if you would rather, stand up and opine. p134. So I turned to his disciple and said, I charge you by Him through whom harm is turned away, p135. tell me who this is. p136. He said: This is Abū Zayd of Sarūj, the lamp of wayfarers, p137. and the crown of men of letters. p138. So I turned back by the way I had arrived, p139. and wondered my fill at what I had perceived.

Translator's log — frozen before any evaluation is designed

The rule of enumeration, as it was actually applied. R43 rule 3 says: write the ordinary English renderings of each rhyme-bearing member the hand would accept on the sense alone, then look for a pair among them. The bearer is a word, not a colon. A pair was counted reachable only where it appeared among the ordinary renderings of the two bearers; a pair obtainable by inverting the clause so that some other word fell last, or by importing a word the Arabic has not got, was not counted (rule 2 outranks rule 3). Applying that strictly is what turned S01 and S67 from available into UNAVAILABLE.

The kind column exists because the instrument's NEAR is wide. tools/rhyme_pairs.py returns NEAR for any two words sharing a suffix — running / singing grades NEAR by rule N1. Twenty-seven of this hand's thirty-three chimes are of that kind, and they are marked NEAR-suffix so that nobody, including this project, can read the total as thirty-three rhymes.

Totals as the hand grades them, before any outside check. Primary pool 65 (the 64 frozen loci plus S67, §Two amendments): TAKEN 33 · AVAILABLE-REFUSED 1 · UNAVAILABLE 31. Of the 33 TAKEN, 4 are STRICT, 2 are NEAR on a real vowel/coda relation, and 27 are NEAR-suffix. VERSE-WOULD-SOLVE is flagged at 9 loci — S25–S33, the run of rhetorical questions where an English couplet would have delivered the rhyme for nothing.

The verse, graded

The Arabic runs three deep in V-A and six deep in V-B; the English runs three and then two, two, two. R42 rule 4 forbids attempting the source's run length and the English obeys it. The three-deep chain in V-A was not attempted either — it fell out of the sense, and is recorded as having done so.

What was hard

1. The sermon is a machine for producing pairs, and English is not. Al-Ḥarīrī builds sixty-six rhyme figures in 590 words, and the only place the machine idles is the six-word formula then he recited. Rendering it, the hand found the same thing over and over: the Arabic pair is two words of the same morphological shape from different roots (مقيلك ⁄ قيلك, معشرك ⁄ محشرك), and English has no morphology that does that. Twenty-seven of the thirty-three chimes this hand found are English suffixes — -ing against -ing, -ness against -ness — which is the same category of accident that RS-20260822c §3 found in the four published Gulistans (applauded ⁄ mortified: two past participles). The one difference is that this hand was trying, and trying got it from twelve-in-a-hundred-and-twenty-eight to a half — of a kind of chime a reader may well not hear.

2. Four places gave a real rhyme, and all four are lexical accidents. a mite ⁄ a bite (S03), my face ⁄ my case (S06), overweening ⁄ preening (S17), dine ⁄ opine (S63). None was engineered: each was the ordinary rendering of both bearers, and the pair was there when the two lists were set side by side. S17 is the best of them, because سادر في غلوائه ⁄ سادل ثوب خيلائه is a strut-and-vanity pair and overweening ⁄ preening is a strut-and-vanity pair.

3. S61 is a locus English cannot answer, and the reason is grammatical. «يحملق إليّ ⁄ يسطو عليّ» rhymes two prepositions carrying the same pronoun — ilayya ⁄ ʿalayya. English puts the pronoun last in both and it is the same word: at me ⁄ upon me. No enumeration helps; the language has taken the position the rhyme needs and filled it with a single form.

4. The two total puns were answered, and the instrument cannot see it. At S39 al-Ḥarīrī uses the identical word twice — tastahdīhi of a guide (seek guidance of) and of a provision (seek a gift of) — and at S42 one skeleton with two vowellings, ṣaduqāt (bride-prices) ⁄ ṣadaqāt (alms). English can do both, by repeating a word that carries both senses: a guide you would ask of ⁄ a store you would ask of, and outbidding in bride-gifts ⁄ keeping up **alms-gifts. tools/rhyme_pairs.py grades identical bearers NONE by rule, so these are excluded from the primary and reported in prose — which ../loci-frozen.md §2 fixed before anything was rendered.

5. Three figures were carried that nobody registered. ثوب ⁄ ثواب at S40 — garment ⁄ guerdon, a real English pair for a real Arabic one. تتناهى ⁄ تنتهي at S20 — go to the end of ⁄ come to the end of. حماه ⁄ تتحاماه at S45 — break into its enclosure ⁄ do not fence yourself. None of them is at the rhyme-bearer, so none of them counts, and all three are the kind of thing a census of end-rhymes is blind to.

6. What was lost, named. The saj' at S08–S11, S14, S15, S21, S22, S43, S44, S58, S60: gone, and in most cases not close. S58 is the worst — four cola of monorhyme (تلميذ ⁄ سميذ ⁄ حنيذ ⁄ نبيذ, the disciple, the fine bread, the roast kid and the wine-jar) and the English has disciple, flour, pit, wine. S44's اقران ⁄ قرآن — comrades against Qur'ān, the pun the whole sentence turns on — is simply not available.

7. Register. The hand wrote a plain, slightly archaic English and did not reach for the Victorian orientalist manner, because it had not read the hands and did not want to imitate a manner it could not see. Where that manner would have helped is V-B, where the six-deep Arabic mono-rhyme wants a sustained English rhyme and got three couplets.

Two amendments, both made before any English was opened

1. S67 was added after the freeze. The loci were enumerated from the copy-text's period punctuation, and «حدث الحارث… لما اقتعدت غارب الاغتراب، وأنأتني المتربة عن الأتراب،» carries a saj' pair inside p001 marked with commas. The hand found it while translating the first sentence. It is added as S67, flagged POST-FREEZE-ADDED, and the study reports its primary both with and without it. No English had been opened.
2. The bearer-level reading of rule 3 (§The rule of enumeration) is written down here because it is stricter than the regime's text and it is what was actually done; it lowers this hand's TAKEN count and could not raise it.