On Love and Youth: Three Translations of Sa'di
By Sa'Di
()
About this ebook
Many of the stories in On Love and Youth, the fifth chapter of Sa'di's Gulistan, involve love affairs between men and youths: masters with slaves, princes with youthful subjects, teachers with schoolboys, and other variations. In most cases, the context of the relationship suggests that the youth is an adolescent or young man. For quite some time, readers in the English-speaking world had no idea Sa'di's Gulistan contained such stories, for translators either changed references to boys to refer to girls instead or, just as frequently, deleted the stories entirely. These three translations do not make that mistake.
Little is known about the life of the Persian writer Muslih al-Din, better known as Sa’di. Some scholars, who have tried to piece together a biography based on his stories and poems, claim he was married twice, that one of his wives made him miserable, and that he lost an only son. Other scholars have warned against such assumptions. The only information that can be given with confidence is that Sa’di lived most if not all his life in the thirteenth century, that he hailed from Shiraz, and that he was familiar with Sufi practices. It is also known that his two most famous works, Bustan (The Orchard) and Gulistan (The Rose Garden) were written in 1257 and 1258, respectively, and that the characteristics that have made the latter the most famous single work in Persian literature are the author’s wit, wisdom, and humanity.
Sa'Di
Little is known about the life of the Persian writer Muslih al-Din, better known as Sa’di. Some scholars, who have tried to piece together a biography based on his stories and poems, claim he was married twice, that one of his wives made him miserable, and that he lost an only son. Other scholars have warned against such assumptions. The only information that can be given with confidence is that Sa’di lived most if not all his life in the thirteenth century, that he hailed from Shiraz, and that he was familiar with Sufi practices. It is also known that his two most famous works, Bustan (The Orchard) and Gulistan (The Rose Garden) were written in 1257 and 1258, respectively, and that the characteristics that have made the latter the most famous single work in Persian literature are the author’s wit, wisdom, and humanity.
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On Love and Youth - Sa'Di
On Love & Youth
Three Translations of Sa’di
By Sa’di
Translated by James Ross,
Edwin Arnold, & A. Hart Edwards
Annotated and Edited by Keith Hale
Introduced by Edward William West
© 2021 by Keith Hale
All rights reserved. International copyright secured.
Published by Watersgreen House
BISAC: Poetry/Persian
BISAC: Poetry/LGBT
Cover art: Return of the Prodigal Son (detail) by Pompeo Batoni, Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of both the copyright holder and the publisher. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Purchase only authorized editions.
Watersgreen House is an independent international book publisher with editorial staff in the UK and USA. One of our aims at Watersgreen House is to showcase same-sex affection in works by important gay and bisexual authors in ways which were not possible at the time the books were originally published. We also publish nonfiction, including textbooks, as well as contemporary fiction that is literary, unusual, and provocative.
Watersgreen House, Publishers.
Typeset in Georgia, Gabriola, Sylfaen, and Cambria.
Preface
Little is known about the life of the Persian writer Muslih al-Din, better known as Sa’di. Some scholars, who have tried to piece together a biography based on his stories and poems, claim he was married twice, that one of his wives made him miserable, and that he lost an only son. Other scholars have warned against such assumptions. The only information that can be given with confidence is that Sa’di lived most if not all his life in the thirteenth century, that he hailed from Shiraz, and that he was familiar with Sufi practices. It is also known that his two most famous works, Bustan (The Orchard) and Gulistan (The Rose Garden) were written in 1257 and 1258, respectively, and that the characteristics that have made the latter the most famous single work in Persian literature are the author’s wit, wisdom, and humanity.
W. G. Archer noted in a preface written for a translation of Gulistan that when Sa’di was alive The objects of truly passionate love in Persia were boys.
Persia, at that time, included much of present-day Afghanistan, where the practice of boy-love has survived into the 21st Century. As it is in this region that most of Sa’di’s stories take place, Sa’di presents love between men and boys as common activity. Many of the stories in chapter five of Gulistan involve love affairs between men and youths: masters with slaves, princes with youthful subjects, teachers with schoolboys, and other variations. In most cases, the context of the relationship suggests that the boy
is an adolescent or young man. If that is the general rule with Sa’di’s stories, the love relationships described follow the pattern established in ancient Greece and Rome that continued into the Renaissance with Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Shakespeare, and many others, and that also have continued into the present day, although the practice is currently suppressed in many countries.
For quite some time, readers in the English-speaking world had no idea Gulistan contained such stories, for translators either changed references to boys to refer to girls instead or, just as frequently, deleted the stories entirely. This was the case with the first English translations by Stephen Sullivan (1774), James Dumoulin (1807), and Francis Gladwin (1806).
The exception was the James Ross translation that appeared in 1823, which included the masculine nouns and pronouns for at least some stories. Ross also supplied them occasionally when they were not present but clearly implied. It should be noted, however, that Ross was working from a 1651 Latin translation by Georgius Gentius, which was accompanied by the Persian text (1651). The Ross translation included an introduction to Ross himself (he was a well-traveled naval surgeon and scholar from Aberdeen) written by Cambridge librarian, historian, and gay poet Charles Sayles, who was perhaps best known at Cambridge for the coterie of handsome young men, including the poet, Rupert Brooke, and the mountaineer, George Mallory, who regularly congregated at his house. The next noteworthy translation, by Edward Backhouse Eastwick in 1852, sanitized the work even further than the earlier translators by entirely excising homosexuality and/or attraction to adolescents from the work. He also made it appear as if Sa’di had written doggerel (Edward Fitzgerald put it best when he wrote that Eastwick was "wretched in the verse"). This translation, regrettably, is still being circulated by the Sufi Trust.
Translator John Platts did not shy away from scenes of homosexual encounters, but he also did not have the nerve to provide