The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in literature, history, Iran, and related subjects.
Sa’di in Love: The Lyrical Verses of Persia’s Master Poet is a collection of verse by a Persian poet and prose writer of the medieval era. He is recognized for the quality of his writings and for the depth of his social and moral thoughts.
The TU Library collection includes a number of books by and about Sa’di.
Sa’di’s best known works are Bustan (The Orchard) completed in 1257 and Gulistan (The Rose Garden) completed in 1258.
An early translator wrote:
Saadi, though he has not the lyric flights of Hafiz, has wit, practical sense, and just moral sentiments. He has the instinct to teach, and from every occurrence must draw the moral, like [Benjamin] Franklin. He is the poet of friendship, love, self-devotion, and serenity. There is a uniform force in his page, and, conspicuously, a tone of cheerfulness, which has almost made his name a synonyme for this grace. The word Saadi means fortunate . In him the trait is no result of levity, much less of convivial habit, but first of a happy nature, to which victory is habitual, easily shedding, mishaps, with sensi bility’to pleasure, and with resources against pain. But it also results from the habitual perception of the beneficent laws that control the world. He inspires in the reader a good hope. What a contrast between the cynical tone of Byron and the benevolent wisdom of Saadi! Saadi has been longer and better known in the Western nations than any of his countrymen. By turns, a student, a water-carrier, a traveller, a soldier fighting against the Christians in the Crusades, a prisoner employed to dig trenches before Tripoli, and an honored poet in his protracted old age at home,— his varied and severe experience took away all provincial tone, and gave him a facility of speaking to all conditions. But the commanding reason of his wider popularity is his deeper sense, which, in his treatment, expands the local forms and tints to a cosmopolitan breadth. Through his Persian dialect he speaks to all nations, and, like Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Montaigne, is perpetually modern.
To the sprightly but indolent Persians, conversation is a game of skill. They wish to measure wit with you, and expect an adroit, a brilliant, or a profound answer. Many narratives, doubtless, have suffered in the translation, since a promising anecdote sometimes heralds a flat speech. But Saadi’s replies are seldom vulgar. His wit answers to the heart of the question, often quite over the scope of the inquirer.
He has also that splendor of expression which alone, without wealth of thought, sometimes constitutes a poet, and forces us to ponder the problem of style. In his poem on his old age, he says: Saadi’s whole power lies in his sweet words: let this gift remain to me, I care not what is taken.”
The poet or thinker must always be, in a rude nation, the chief authority on religion. All questions touching its truth and obligation will come home to him, at last, for their answer. As he thinks and speaks will intelligent men believe. Therefore a certain deference must be shown him by the priests, — a result which conspicuously appears in the history of Hafiz and Saadi. In common with his countrymen, Saadi gives prominence to fatalism, — a doctrine which, in Persia, in Arabia, and in India, has had, in all ages, a dreadful charm.
An article posted on the BBC website suggested:
In the 13th Century AD, during one of the most turbulent periods in Iranian history, the poet Sa’di left his native Shiraz to study in Baghdad. […]
Together with the Bustan (Garden), his other best-known book, the Golestan remains one of the most beloved works of Persian literature many centuries on. “Created from one essence, people are members of a single body,” Sa’di wrote in what today is not only his most-quoted poem, but perhaps also the most famous poem in the Persian-speaking world. “Should one member suffer pain, the rest shall, too. You who feel no sorrow for the distress of others cannot be called a human being.”
If other medieval Persian poets are revered for their ecstatic writings on love, tales of chivalry and derring-do among the heroes of old Iran, or insights on the human condition and man’s place in the grand scheme of things, Sa’di is, as Lord Byron aptly called him, “the moral poet of [Iran]”. In spite of the inhumanity and terror surrounding him, Sa’di had faith and hope in mankind, and as such devoted much of his attention to explaining morals and ethics while enjoining his readers to cultivate more noble qualities within themselves. “Ask not,” he admonished, “a dervish in poor circumstances, and in the distress of a year of famine, how he feels, unless thou art ready to apply a salve to his wound or to provide him with a maintenance.” Sa’di also believed that “a liberal man who eats and bestows is better than a devotee who fasts and hoards”.
As much as he advocated goodness, however, Sa’di was also a very practical and realistic thinker. His circumstances – Sa’di lived in “a very violent and brutal world,” Persian literature scholar Dick Davis tells BBC Culture – no doubt had much to do with this fact. “A falsehood resulting in conciliation is better than a truth producing trouble,” Sa’di wrote in the Golestan. Similarly, he warned “not [to give] information to a [prince] of the treachery of anyone, unless thou art sure he will accept it; else thou wilt only be preparing thy own destruction”. Just as the Golestan and Bustan had much to say about the strange, uncertain times in which Sa’di lived, so too do they have wisdom to impart concerning the current pandemic. […]
Amongst the first Persian poets to achieve renown in Europe, Sa’di had a marked influence on Enlightenment and Romantic writers in France and elsewhere, such as Voltaire, Diderot, Goethe, and Victor Hugo, who quoted some of the Golestan’s introductory passages regarding the garden story in the epigraph of Les Orientales. […]
In the US, Sa’di greatly inspired Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his eponymous poem in praise of the poet (Saadi), Emerson called Sa’di “the cheerer of men’s hearts”, and commented on the universal appeal of his “benevolent wisdom”: “Through his Persian dialect,” wrote Emerson in his introduction to Francis Gladwin’s translation of the Golestan, “he speaks to all nations, and, like Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Montaigne, is perpetually modern”. It is perhaps for this reason that in the United Nations headquarters in New York there is a Persian carpet, embroidered with the famous verses from the Golestan concerning the unity of mankind, which Barack Obama quoted in his 2009 Iranian New Year message. “There was some awareness in that administration of Iranians’ love of poetry,” says author and political commentator Hooman Majd, “and the notion of speaking to the Iranian people in a respectful way was Obama’s. I imagine his speechwriters got the input from someone aware of the carpet”.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)