Repository path: workshop/translations/maqamat-sanaa/R50-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

«المقامة الصنعانية» — al-Ḥarīrī's first Assembly, whole, R50 v1: Preston's own remedy

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. The whole maqāma — 139 prose cola and 9 verse lines, 590 Arabic tokens.

Regime. R50 the balanced period — ../../regimes/R50-balanced-periods.md. This is the third English policy the project has run on this text and the first that is a published translator's own positive prescription rather than the project's construction. Preston 1850 refused the rhyme and in the same sentence said what he would put in its place: clauses "though not rhyming together … arranged as far as possible in evenly balanced periods, and never exceed a certain length." R48 tested his refusal. R50 tests his remedy.

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 unchanged from R43-v1/R48-v1, and this is declared rather than done quietly. Preston's verse policy — the metrical passages "into English verse", rhymed — is the policy all three of this project's arms already follow, so re-rendering the nine lines would introduce a difference the regimes do not call for. All four arms on this text (R43, R48, R48D, R50) are therefore identical in the verse, which is also why every study built on them excludes the verse blocks from its segments.

Contamination: measured clean against all three published hands, and the self-overlap declared

Measured with tools/dependence_check.py before this page was written and before any evaluation of it was designed, against the three stored comparators of A-hariri-hands. No published hand was opened, read, or quoted in the making of this rendering; the comparators were passed to the tool as file paths and only its statistics were read.

The lead's overlap with Chenery is exactly the overlap two independent published hands have with each other — 5 shared 7-grams and an 11-token run, the same figures in both rows. clean on the tool's verdict, and contamination: none on this page's front matter.

What is not clean, and must be said, is the overlap with the lead's own arms — note (bhb), the standing finding that this hand matches itself above its record against any published human translation:

R50 is not a de-rhymed R43. The two arms S221 already had share 168 twelve-grams and a 37-token run; R50 shares 17 with one and 2 with the other. Refusing the chime and balancing the members turned out to move far more of the wording than adopting the chime did — which is a fact about the three policies, and the reason it is recorded here is that a reader of any study built on these arms is entitled to know how much daylight there is between them.

The rendering

The narrator comes to Ṣan'ā

p001. Al-Ḥārith ibn Hammām related: When I had mounted the withers of exile, and poverty had parted me from my age-mates, the winds of Time tossed me — p002. to Ṣan'ā in the Yemen. p003. I entered it with my wallet empty, p004. and my penury open to view. p005. I owned nothing that would suffice me, p006. nor found in my scrip a mouthful. p007. So I fell to crossing her streets like a man distracted, p008. and to circling her quarters as the parched bird circles. p009. And I searched the pasture-grounds of my gaze, p010. and the walking-grounds of my mornings and evenings, p011. for a generous man before whom I might wear thin my face, p012. and to whom I might lay my necessity open; p013. or a man of letters whose face would lift my gloom, p014. and whose recital would slake my thirst. p015. Until the last of my wandering brought me, p016. and the first of God's mercies gave me guidance, p017. to a meeting-ground broad and open, p018. with a press of people and a sound of weeping. p019. So I pushed into the thicket of the crowd, p020. to find out what was drawing the tears; p021. and I saw, in the middle of the ring, p022. a man of a slender build, p023. upon him the gear of the road, p024. and in him the ring of the dirge. p025. He was stamping out rhymes with the jewels of his speech, p026. and striking the ears with the rebukes of his sermon; p027. and a mixed crowd had ringed him about, p028. as the halo rings the moon, p029. and the calyx the fruit. p030. So I edged in to take a light from his profit, p031. and to pick up a few of his single pearls; p032. and I heard him say, when he had broken into his stride, p033. and the camel-throats of his improvising roared:

The sermon

p034. O you that walk blindly on in your excess, p035. you that let down the robe of your conceit, p036. you that bolt headlong into your follies, p037. you that lean away toward your idle tales: p038. how long will you keep to your error, p039. and find good pasture in your wrong? p040. And until when will you go to the end of your pride, p041. and never come to the end of your sport? p042. You go out to fight with your disobedience p043. against the Owner of your forelock! p044. You grow bold, with the foulness of your conduct, p045. against Him who knows what is in your heart! p046. You hide yourself from the man beside you, p047. and you stand in the sight of your Watcher! p048. You steal out of sight of your own bondman, and no hidden thing is hidden from your King! p049. Do you think your estate will do you good, p050. when the hour of your going is come? p051. Or that your wealth will be your deliverance, p052. when your own deeds have wrought your fall? p053. Or that your remorse will be of any use, p054. at the moment your foot gives way? p055. Or that your kindred will show you tenderness, p056. on the day the Gathering folds you in? p057. Why have you not struck the highroad of your guidance, p058. nor hurried the cure of your malady, p059. nor blunted the edge of your aggression, p060. nor curbed your soul, which is the chief of your enemies? p061. Is not death your appointed time? p062. Then what have you made ready? p063. Is not grey hair your warning? p064. Then what is your excuse? p065. Is not the grave-niche your resting-place? p066. Then what is your answer? p067. Is not God your journey's end? p068. Then who is your helper? p069. How often has Time waked you, and you feigned sleep, p070. and preaching has pulled at you, and you hung back! p071. The lessons were made plain to you, and you feigned blindness, p072. the truth was laid bare to you, and you disputed, p073. death put you in mind, and you feigned forgetting, p074. you had it in you to comfort, and you did not comfort! p075. You prefer a coin you can pocket, p076. to a saying you might take to heart; p077. and you choose a palace to raise up, p078. over a kindness to bestow; p079. and you turn away from a guide you might ask the road of, p080. toward a provision you might ask as a gift; p081. and you let the love of a robe you long for p082. outweigh a reward you might purchase. p083. The rubies of gifts given p084. cling closer to your heart than the hours of prayer; p085. and outbidding in bride-price p086. stands higher with you than keeping up alms; p087. and the dishes of many courses p088. are more to your taste than the pages of the faiths; p089. and joking with your equals p090. is better company to you than reading the Qur'ān! p091. You order what is right and break into its precinct, p092. and you fence off what is wrong and do not keep clear of it! p093. You warn men off injustice, and then walk into it, p094. and you fear men, when God has more right to 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 his dust, p097. and dried up his spittle, p098. and carried his water-skin at his side, p099. and tucked his cudgel under his arm. p100. And when the company had looked at his readiness, p101. and seen him prepared to quit his place, p102. every one of them put his hand in his pocket, p103. and filled him a bucket out of his bounty, p104. and said: Spend this on your own keep, p105. or share it out among your company. p106. So he took it from them with his eyes lowered, p107. and turned away from them with praise on his tongue; p108. and he set about taking leave of all who saw him off, p109. so that his open road should stay hidden from them, p110. and slipping away from all who came after him, p111. so that his lodging should not be known. p112. Al-Ḥārith ibn Hammām said: So I went after him, hiding my eye from him, p113. and tracked his footsteps from where he could not see me. p114. Until he came to the mouth of a cave, p115. and slipped inside, suspecting nothing. p116. So I gave him time to pull off his sandals, p117. and to wash his feet; p118. then I burst in on him. p119. And I found him sharing a meal with a disciple, p120. over bread of the finest flour, p121. and a kid roasted in a pit, p122. and facing the two of them, a jar of wine. p123. So I said to him: Sir, is that your report, p124. and this the truth of you? p125. He heaved a sigh like the heat of high summer, p126. and all but burst asunder with rage, p127. and he kept his eyes rolling upon me, p128. until I was afraid he would strike. p129. And when his fire had died down, p130. and his blaze was out of sight, 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 eat; p133. or, if you would rather, get up and speak. p134. So I turned to his disciple and said: I adjure you by Him through whom harm is put by, p135. tell me who this man is. p136. He said: This is Abū Zayd of Sarūj, the lamp of men in exile, p137. and the crown of men of letters. p138. So I went back the way I had come, p139. and had my fill of wonder at what I had seen.

Translator's log — frozen before any evaluation of this rendering is designed

What the regime asked for, and the trap in it. Preston's sentence has two clauses and they pull against each other. The clauses must be evenly balanced and they must not rhyme together. In English the cheapest way to balance two clauses is to give them the same grammatical suffix — two -ing nouns, two -ness abstracts, two -ation nouns — and the same suffix is a rhyme. So the positive half of the rule keeps generating violations of the negative half. This is not a speculation about the language: it is what happened at eight loci in this rendering, listed below, and it is the single fact this rendering exists to record.

The eight refusals — a chime that was available and was given up

Four of the eight are the identical-bearer accident, and all four come from the same source construction: al-Ḥarīrī's second-person sermon puts the enclitic ‑كَ at the end of colon after colon, and the ordinary English for it is a final you. The Arabic rhymes through that suffix (‑ادُكَ ⁄ ‑ارُكَ); English cannot, because you is you. To keep Preston's rule the hand has to move the pronoun off the end of the clause every time, which is a recurring, mechanical, and entirely avoidable-looking cost that only shows up once you try to obey him.

What the grading says

tools/rhyme_pairs.py, on all 138 adjacent colon-end pairs of each arm, same rule and same tool as RS-20260825b used:

The R43 row is the interesting one and it was not predicted. An ordinary careful English rendering that was merely not reaching for the chime still fell into 29 near-echoes and 5 identical colon-end bearers by accident. A rendering that refuses the chime as a policy has 5 and 0. Restraint is not the same as refusal, and the difference is a factor of six.

Balance, graded as the absolute difference in syllables between the two members of each of the 69 saj' pairs:

The regime did what it declared, by a clear margin and on a measure fixed before the rendering.

The declared exceptions

• Three cola exceed the fourteen-word ceiling: p001 (26 words), p048 (18), p134 (19). All three are cola that carry a speech tag or contain an internal balanced pair of their own — the copy-text's colon boundary and Preston's clause are not the same unit there. p048's two members are themselves balanced at 11 syllables each; p001's three are at 11 / 11 / 6.
• The worst-balanced pairs are p134 / p135 (22 vs 6 syllables) and p136 / p137 (15 vs 8), and both are speech-tag artefacts: So I turned to his disciple and said and He said: This is Abū Zayd of Sarūj are English apparatus around the balanced members. Measured on the members alone, p136 / p137 is the lamp of men in exile ⁄ the crown of men of letters — seven syllables each. The whole-colon figure is the one declared in advance and is the one reported above; this note is the reason it reads worse than the prose does.
• p116 / p117 and p089 / p090 are lopsided in the Arabic too, and rule 2 forbids padding the short member to match.

Two puns that no policy in this project reaches

• p079 / p080 rhymes تَسْتَهْدِيهِ with تَسْتَهْديهِ — the same word twice, once "you ask him for guidance" and once "you ask it as a gift." It is a tajnīs tāmm, a perfect homonym pun, and it is the rhyme. English has no pair here; all three arms render the sense and lose the figure.
• p083 / p084 rhymes يَواقيت (rubies) with مَواقيت (appointed hours) — the gifts against the prayers, one consonant apart. R48 bought the chime by other means; R50 refuses it and keeps only the antithesis.

What was lost, and what the hand noticed while losing it

The sermon's force in Arabic comes from the reader knowing where each colon will stop before it stops — the rhyme is a metronome. Balancing the members reproduces the stopping without reproducing the landing: the clauses come out the same size, and then end on nothing in particular. Whether that is Preston's "middle place between prose and verse" or merely prose that has been tidied is the question this rendering was made to put to somebody else, and the hand does not answer it here.

One further thing the hand will record because it is checkable rather than evaluative: the words that arrive when the chime is refused are commoner words. R50 has 4 colon-end bearers outside CMUdict against 15 for R43 and 18 for R48. Reaching for a rhyme, or even merely allowing one, pulls the diction toward the unusual end of the lexicon; refusing it pushes back.

Frozen before evaluation

This log was written and committed before any study using this rendering was designed. Nothing in it is a claim about how good the rendering is; the two sentences that come nearest are marked as the hand's own and carry no evidential weight — internal-judgment-only.