From the introduction of
Selections from Saadi's Gulistan

If you would like to read some sample poems from Selections From Saadi's Gulistan, please click here.

When my wife and I got married—she is from Iran—we decided to read poems to express publicly how we felt about each other. She chose a poem by Hafez; I, one by Yehuda Amichai that had been translated into English by Robert Friend. The only English version we had of the Hafez poem, however, made the man whom many consider the Persian language’s greatest lyric poet sound like a second-class greeting-card versifier. At the time, my Persian was non-existent, and so my wife produced a literal, line-by-line rendering of the poem, and I used that to compose the translation that she read. On the video we have of that day, you can see in her eyes as she reads to me how deeply she feels the words she is saying, and just now, remembering it, I stopped typing so that I could stare out the window of the Starbuck’s where I’m sitting and relive those moments again. I can still recite the poem’s first few lines :

Call me and I will come.
From between the bars
of earth’s closed cage,
a bird of heaven,
I will come.

I open the file containing the poem on my laptop and read it through for the first time in many years. I did not claim then, and I would not claim now, that my translation is anything other than occasional, and I can see now many places where I could make changes that would free the language to become its own poem in English and not merely a version of Hafez that fit the occasion of our marriage. Still, I think some small part of Hafez speaks through my words, and I imagine how beautiful it must be to be able to read him in the original.

Like rain for the earth,
bless me. Before the wind
puts my dust
beyond the reach of your hand,
touch me,
and I will come.

…

To the fragrance of your presence,
dancing I will rise,
clapping I will come to you
with a rhythm of joy.

When I wrote those lines, most of the translations of Hafez that have since been published—by Elizabeth T. Gray and Thomas Rain Crowe, to name a couple—were still five or six years from seeing print, and I had no idea how important a poet Hafez actually was. I did vaguely know the name Rumi, though I had not read any of the translations of his work that were available, and, anyway, I had classified him in my imagination and my ignorance as someone whose work would appeal more to a mysticism-oriented, New-Age sensibility than to that of a serious writer. What I knew about Persian literature, in other words, could probably have filled half the back of a postage stamp.

Not that I wasn’t interested in learning. Early on in our marriage, I suggested to my wife that we should work together to translate contemporary Iranian poetry. That project never got off the ground, though, and so, except for the very limited reading that I did on my own, my ignorance of Persian literature remained firmly in place. Then, last year, my friend Iraj called and asked if I’d be interested in joining a project to produce summaries in English of some of the major works of classical Persian literature. Of course I was interested. Here was a chance to read a body of work I knew next to nothing about and that was also part of my wife’s cultural heritage. When I found out, however, at my first meeting with Mehdi Faridzadeh of the International Society for Iranian Culture, whose brainchild this project was, that the goal was to produce not summaries but literary translations, I balked. I speak and understand some Persian, but I neither read nor write the language. How, I wondered to myself, could I hope adequately to translate works that my wife talks about trying to read in the way that I talk about trying to read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales?

I knew, of course, that many well-known writers have translated works into English from languages they didn’t know, or knew about as well as I knew Persian—Ezra Pound, W. S. Merwin, William Butler Yeats, Adrienne Rich, and Kenneth Rexroth, to name a few—but I had not gone to my meeting with Mehdi thinking at all about the responsibility to the people and culture of both the source and target languages that literary translation always entails. I worried that what Mehdi had in mind was way over my head, and so I asked him point blank why he had not tried to find someone who was fluent in Persian. He explained that he was more interested in producing English versions of these books that people would actually enjoy reading than in scholarly or technical accuracy. What he wanted was an English-speaking poet who would use the scholarly translations that already existed, and that everyone agreed were generally accurate, to produce works in English that would have literary merit. These new translations, he hoped, would provide a new window into Iranian culture for people in the English-speaking world.

I was still unsure, but when Mehdi told me that Saadi’s Gulistan, the first of the books he wanted to do, had not been translated in its entirety into English since the 1880s, I was intrigued. I agreed to produce some samples from the Gulistan, submitted them to Mehdi, who liked them, and the result is the book you are holding in your hand. As far as I can tell, it is the first new literary translation into English of Saadi’s masterpiece in at least a century that includes excerpts from the entire text. Not that the work has been totally ignored. At least two other twentieth century scholar-writers, Dick Davis and A. J. Arberry, have produced translations of smaller portions of the text; the ubiquitous Coleman Barks has translated some of Saadi’s poems, as did Basil Bunting; and there is even a book called Saadi Stories For Young Adults, excerpts from Saadi translated for teens by Muhammad Nur Abdus Salam.

My translation, however, is based primarily on Edward Rehatsek’s 1888 version, which is generally recognized as the most accurate complete translation that we have. I also consulted two other translations: The Rose Garden (Gulistan), translated by Omar Ali-Shah and Kings and Beggars: The First Two Chapters of Sa’di’s Gulistan, translated by A. J. Arberry. When I needed to consult the original Persian, my wife, Maryam Samani, served as my principal source.

In the preface to Kings and Beggars, Arberry asks a question that bears directly on Mehdi’s reasons for undertaking this project and that I think is even more relevant today than it was when Arberry asked it:

Another translation of the Gulistan? What is wrong with Gladwin’s, Eastwick’s, Platt’s, Burton’s, Arnold’s? [B]ut first there is a still more fundamental question to be considered: why translate the Gulistan at all?

But some readers may not have heard of the Gulistan or its author: far fewer people know anything about Persian literature nowadays, than at any time during the past century and a half. And that is a pity, because Persian literature is still largely unexplored territory, in spite of the extensive prospecting of a notable succession of English scholars; and much remains to be done in interpreting and appreciating even the familiar and popular books, like for instance the Gulistan.

Most people in the United States still don’t know a lot about Persian literature, but they do think they know an awful lot about the culture and people of Iran. A great deal, if not all of what they think they know, however, has been shaped less by any direct encounter with Iranians or Iranian culture than by the various interests competing to shape and politicize our understanding of Iran’s place in the world. I have my own ideas about the people and institutions who embody those interests, as you most probably do as well. We do ourselves a disservice, though, not to mention the disservice we do to the Iranian people, when we allow those interests to be almost the sole lens through which we can view Iranians and their country.

It is, for example, hard to imagine, or at least it was hard for me to imagine before I began working on this project, that Persian literature was understood at the end of the 19^th century to be something that the average educated reader in English should know about. Reading John D. Yohannan’s book, Persian Poetry in England and America: A 200-Year History, I was surprised to learn how many of the writers I’d studied in college had been influenced by Persian literature, and by Saadi specifically, among them Longfellow, Tennyson and Byron—who called Saadi a Persian Catullus—and Melville, Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who referred to the Gulistan as a secular bible. Emerson not only wrote a poem called “Saadi,” but he also provided the preface to the 1865 edition of Francis Gladwin’s 1806 translation, the first complete translation of the text to appear in English.

So what happened over the course of the next eighty years—Kings and Beggars was published in 1945—that people’s interest in Persian literature had declined to the point where Arberry could cite it as justification for translating the Gulistan once again? I’m sure the answer to this question is complex and many-faceted, but having read some portion of most of the existing Gulistan translations, I would hazard a guess that they are themselves part of the reason for people’s loss of interest. It’s not that I think they are “bad” in any simplistic sense. Each, as far as I am able to determine, served the purpose set for it by its author, from rendering the Gulistan into more or less accurate English to approximating in English the stylistic and poetic affects achieved in Persian by Saadi. It is, however, hard for me to imagine anyone reading these translations now, or even at the time they were published, and being moved in anything other than a purely intellectual fashion, a response which Saadi himself says he tried to avoid by filling the Gulistan with humor and linguistic playfulness.

To read the full introduction, click here.

from the Adoration and Preamble

I held in my bath a perfumed piece of clay
that came to me from a beloved’s hand.
I asked it, “Are you musk or ambergris?
Like fine wine, your smell intoxicates me.”

“Till someone set me down beside a rose,”
it said, “I was a loathsome lump of clay.
My companion’s scent seeped into me.
Otherwise, I am only the earth that I am.”

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When he was asked what crime his father’s viziers had committed, Hormuzd replied, “None. I put these men in jail because they feared my power without respecting it. I knew that to protect themselves from the capriciousness they saw in me and the harm they thought might come to them because of it, they might try to kill me. So I had no choice. I took the advice of the sages, who said:

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The soldier kneeling before the king gave this report: The fort had been taken; the enemy’s forces were prisoners of war. By his majesty’s good fortune, the entire district was now pacified and subject to his rule.

He was an Arab king, sick with old age and waiting to die. “This message is not for me,” he sighed deeply, “but for my true enemies, the heirs to my throne.”

I’ve lived until the end of my desires,
each one fulfilled according to my wish,
but now I’m old, tired, and I can hear,
in each breath I have left, Fate’s hand striking
Death’s drum in the rhythm of my dying.
The pleasures of my past will not return.
The time I spent on them has realized me
no profit. Eyes, bid this head farewell.
Palm, forearm, the fingers of my hand,
take leave of each other. You who were my friends
come close one last time. This life I leave
leaves in its wake only ignorance.
I have accomplished nothing. Be on your guard.

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An Arab king who was notorious for his cruelty came on a pilgrimage to the cathedral mosque of Damascus, where he offered the following prayer, clearly seeking God’s assistance in a matter of some urgency:

“The darvish, poor, owning nothing, the man
whose money buys him anything he wants,
here, on this floor, enslaved, we are equals.
Nonetheless, the man who has the most
comes before You bearing the greater need.”

When the king was done praying, he noticed me immersed in my own prayers at the head of the prophet Yahia’s tomb. The monarch turned to me, “I know that God favors you darvishes because you are passionate in your worship and honest in the way you live your lives. I fear a powerful enemy, but if you add your prayers to mine, I am sure that God will protect me for your sake.”

“Have mercy on the weak among your own people,” I replied, “and no one will be able to defeat you.”

To break each of a poor man’s ten fingers
just because you have the strength offends God.
Show compassion to those who fall before you,
and others will extend their hands when you are down.

The man who plants bad seed hallucinates
if he expects sweet fruit at harvest time.
Take the cotton from your ears! Give
your people justice before justice finds you.

All men and women are to each other
the limbs of a single body, each of us drawn
from life’s shimmering essence, God’s perfect pearl;
and when this life we share wounds one of us,
all share the hurt as if it were our own.
You, who will not feel another’s pain,
you forfeit the right to be called human.

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In response to the praise being heaped upon him by the people he was with, the great man raised his head and said, “ I am as I know myself to be.”

You who list my virtues one by one,
please stop, you’re hurting me: The traits you name
are those that all can see. You do not know
the others lying hidden in my heart.

When people look at me, they see a man
who does what’s right, and so I please their eyes,
but underneath that surface I am evil,
and ashamed, and I walk with my head held low.
I am like the peacock, praised for the colors
of his tail, but ashamed of his ugly feet.

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The midwinter night had fallen. Not too far away, the king saw a lamp shining in the window of a dehqan’s house. “We will warm ourselves there,” he said, “and return to the hunting party in the morning.” One of the royal advisors, however, insisted that it would be better for the group to make camp on the spot, chasing the cold away with their own fire and sleeping in their own tents. It would be beneath his majesty’s dignity to spend the night in the house of a mere peasant.

While the king was considering the vizier’s words, the dehqan—who had overheard everything—approached the group bearing a tray of food. Bowing low to the ground, the peasant offered this meal to the sultan saying, “It is not that a dehqan’s hospitality would insult the sultan’s dignity so deeply. It is rather that the royal advisors do not want the sultan’s presence to raise the dignity of a dehqan, even for the briefest moment, to a level approaching their own.”

The king was so impressed by the dehqan’s wit that he rejected the vizier’s advice on the spot. The next morning, as he was preparing to leave, the king gave the dehqan a royal robe as a gesture of thanks. The dehqan walked a few steps beside the monarch and, loudly enough so the king’s entourage could hear, recited the following lines:

The sultan’s majesty remained intact
despite this dehqan’s meager offering;
but in the dehqan’s simple heart great joy
is rising, reaching for the morning sun,
the corner of your shadow at my door.

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The poem failed to impress the leader of the gang of thieves in whose honor it had been written. So he ordered the poet who was reciting it to be stripped of his robe and sent out naked into the world.

As soon as the poet left the leader’s tent, he was attacked from behind by a pack of dogs. He tried to pick up a stone to defend himself, but the stone was frozen to the ground. “You sons of whores!” the poet cried out. “You let your dogs run loose but tie down your stones!”

The thieves’ leader heard these words from inside the tent and laughed. “O philosopher,” he said, “what would you ask of me?”

“Give me my robe,” was the poet’s reply, “if you will make me a present of it.

“Let me leave in peace; I’ll expect no gift.
A man hopes to receive the good he deserves.
From you, I hope for nothing. Just don’t hurt me.”

After hearing these words, the leader decided to have pity on the poet and gave him back his robe, as well as a sheepskin jacket and some money.

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When the Arab king heard how Majnun had been driven by his love for Laila to forsake everything and wander the desert as a man possessed, he ordered his servants to bring Majnun to him, and when this was accomplished and Majnun was standing before the king in his court, the king reproached him, asking what fault Majnun had discovered in the human soul that he had chosen instead to live like an animal. Majnun replied:

“My closest friends blame me for loving her,
but if they saw her they would understand.
And you, my love, ravisher of my heart,
let your face shine once on those who scold me
and they will miss the lemons in their hands,
and slice their flesh, and bleed for your beauty.

Then they will know the truth and, like Potiphar’s wife, I will be able to say, “This is the one you blamed me for.”

The king was intrigued and ordered Laila to be brought to him. His servants searched the encampments of several Arab families until they found her and brought her into the palace courtyard. The king looked at her for some time, examining her outward form very carefully, but no matter which angle he looked from, all he could see was an ugliness that became more and more despicable to him as he thought about how highly Majnun had praised her. The plainest handmaiden in his harem was more beautiful than the dark woman he saw before him.

Majnun could tell from the look on the king’s face what he was thinking and said, “To perceive Laila’s beauty and the mystery it reveals to those who can see it, you need to look through my eyes.”

If the leaves on the trees ringing this glade
had heard what I heard of the glade’s story,
they would have lamented it with me. Dear friends,
say to this man who does not seem to care,
“Love has not yet wounded you, and so
you cannot know the agony that overflows
Majnun’s heart.” When you do, we’ll share our tales.
Till then there is no point to talk of bees
with someone who has never felt their sting.
Until we live the same experience,
words will show you only its empty shell.

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I overheard a rich man’s son and a poor man’s son arguing as they stood near the grave of the wealthier boy’s father. “My father’s coffin,” the rich boy was saying, “has a marble gravestone decorated with a mosaic of turquoise-like gems, and his epitaph has been carved in the most elegant script. Your father’s grave, on the other hand, is nothing more than two bricks pushed together with two handfuls of mud thrown over them.”

The poor son listened quietly. Then he said, “By the time your father gets out from under that heavy stone, mine will already be in paradise.”

An ass walks lightly with a light burden.
Just so, a darvish who carries on his back
nothing but his own poverty will arrive
at death’s gate at ease with the life he’s lived
and with his fate; but a wealthy man, whose life
lacked nothing, will find it hard to die,
for death means leaving luxury behind.
In the end, the prisoner who escapes
with nothing will be happier than a prince
whose wealth lies just beyond the bars of his cage.

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Everyone thinks his own thinking is perfect and that his child is the most beautiful.

I watched a Muslim and a Jew debate
and shook with laughter at their childishness.
The Muslim swore, “If what I’ve done is wrong,
may God cause me to die a Jew.” The Jew
swore as well, “If what I’ve said is false,
I swear by the holy Torah that I will die
a Muslim, like you.” If tomorrow the earth
fell suddenly void of all wisdom
no one would admit that it was gone.

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