Repository path: workshop/translations/saadi-ghazals-forced/source-frozen.md · rendered 2026-09-09

Three Sa'di ghazals — the rhyming positions, frozen before any English existed

Copy-text. سعدی, «دیوان اشعار», «غزلیات», ghazals ۹۷, ۹۴, ۱۲۶, from the Ganjoor API (api.ganjoor.net/api/ganjoor/poem?url=/saadi/divan/ghazals/shN), fetched 2026-08-28 and stored verbatim at source-ganjoor-3-ghazals.txt. Sa'di died 1291/2; the text is public domain everywhere. Ganjoor is a single digital witness and this page collates nothing — no manuscript or printed edition was consulted, and variant readings are therefore unknown. That is a limit on any claim about Sa'di's practice; it is not a limit on the English, which is written against the text as given. Same limit, same wording, as ../saadi-ghazals-radif/source-frozen.md (S224).

How a rhyming position is defined here

A ghazal rhymes […qāfiya][radif] at the second hemistich of every bayt and at both hemistichs of the opening bayt (the مطلع). The radif is the word or phrase repeated identically at every such position; the qāfiya (here: bearer) is the word immediately before it. The radif was extracted mechanically — the longest common word-suffix over all rhyming positions, after stripping harakat and normalising ي/ی and ك/ک — by freeze.py, whose output is source-structure.json.

Why these three, and what was fixed before any English was attempted

ARM-radif step 1 (RS-20260826b-radif, S224) established, at 6 of 6 on its own six poems, that whether the Persian shape can be carried whole into English is decided by the radif's part of speech: an English clause ends on an object, a complement or an adverbial, so an English radif can only be something an English clause can end on, and the qāfiya slot immediately before it inherits that constraint.

These three were chosen because all three are the forced case: English can host each radif at the line-end, and in each the slot immediately before it is occupied by a word that cannot be rhymed across the poem. The translator therefore cannot have both halves and must choose one. That enumeration is written out per poem in R54-v1/translation.md §1, before any line was rendered.

24 rhyming positions across 21 bayts, all three at depth 8 — the same depth as ۴۹ and ۵۰ at step 1, and far beyond any قطعه this project has met (depth 2–4).

Sa'di repeats his own bearer in two of the three, which the Persian prosodists count a fault (ایطا): جمال at ۹۷ 1a and 7b, نظیر at ۱۲۶ 1a and 5b. 22 distinct bearers at 24 positions. The same observation was recorded at step 1 (41 distinct at 45), and it is recorded here before any English exists so that no English bearer-count can be compared with it after the fact.

The three poems, position by position

Rhyming positions are marked ●. Line ids are <bayt><a|b>.

۹۷ — radif دوست

۹۴ — radif اوست

۱۲۶ — radif تو نیست

What is not frozen here

No English. No claim about how any of the three ought to be rendered. The regime that governs the rendering is ../../regimes/R54-forced-pair.md, written before this page's translations and after this page.