By Professor John D. Yohannan
(c) From The Poet Sa’di: A Persian Humanist . University Press of America, 1987.
–Sa’di: The Reputation and the Man
Sa’di had been in his grave in Shiraz nearly three and a half centuries before any of his works made a European appearance.[1] When in 1634 Andre du Ryer brought out a partial French translation of the Gulistan as L’Emprise des Roses, he introduced Sa’di as “prince des Poetes Turcs et Persans” and asserted the importance of making available to Eurppeans a book so widely known throughout Moslem lands.[2] In the Islamic world, Sa’di had indeed long since been enshrined among the immortals, his fame having penetrated not only the entire Near East but also India and North Africa. He was the poet not only of the Turks and the Persians, but also of the Arabs, Mongols, Indians and other Moslem peoples. He would soon belong to the world. From the time of the Crusades, during which Sa’di lived, to the time of du Ryer’s translation in the seventeenth century, a considerable change had occurred in the relationship between the Christian West and the Moslem East. The hegemony of power in Asia had passed from Arab and Persian to Seljuk Turk and Mongol, and it was latterly being shared by Ottoman Turk and Safavi Persian. In Europe unified Christendom had given way to rival national states. Religious animosity between East and West may not have dissipated, but there was less inclination for each side to view the other as an undifferentiated enemy bloc. European states in the seventeenth century even saw the possibility of turning one segment of Islam against another – for example, the Persians against the Turks, since the latter’s incursion into Europe had reached the very gates of Vienna.
If geopolitical circumstances were making for а more discriminating scrutiny of the Moslem peoples by the Europeans, the intellectual climate was also becoming more favorable to toleration, whether as consequence or as concurrent cause. The savants of the Enlightenment, however, unlike the European heads of state, were not concerned with national differences within Islam. Rather, they tended to view Islam as an international culture, as indeed the Crusaders had done; but unlike the latter, they did not view it inimically. As a matter of fact, they began to regard the Islamic branch of the human family as not radically different from the Judeo-Christian tree from which it had indeed sprung. Gotthold E. Lessing’s great drama on religious toleration, Nathan der weise, was to be the logical product of this attitude of mind; for what the Enlightenment wanted was a secular, deistic religion, trans-national in character, that could appeal equally to humanists of the Continent, of the British Isles, and of the New World.
Sa’di, the quintessential Moslem humanist, was one of the first wise men of the East to be discovered by the savants of the West. (Another was Confucius, whom Jesuit scholars made available, in a somewhat glamorized image, to Leibniz and other Western enthusiasts.) Since the Continent had the jump in Oriental scholarship, it came to Sa’di before the English-speaking peoples did. Within a year of its publication, du Ryer’s French translation of the Gulistan was rendered into German by Johann F. Ochsenbach. In 1644, one Levin Warner of Leyden published the Persian text and a Latin translation of some maximums of Sa’di, and in 1651 George Gentz (Gentius) brought out in Amsterdam an edition of the entire Gulistan together with a Latin translation. For more than a century, the latter served as a basic text for professional Orientalists as well as for lay students of Persian literature, including Sir William Jones, Johann Gottfried von Herder, and Francis Gladwin, the last of whom was to make the first complete English translation in 1806. In 1654, a full but free German version was published by Adam Oelschlager (Ulearius) under the title of Persianischer Rosenthal. This work was immediately done into Dutch by J.V. Duisberg and three times reproduced in German before the end of the century.
Sa’di’s other famous didactic work, the Bustan, first appeared in 1687, as an appendix to a book of travels by sir John Chardin, published simultaneously in French and English. A year later there was a full Dutch version, and from the latter, in 1696, a German one.[3]
Chiefly from these works of Sa’di, the European savants derived the image of their Persian humanist counterpart. La Fontaine took at least one of his fables from Sa’di. Diderot was enthusiastic about him. Voltaire, in his dedicatory epistle to Zadig, represented the book as a translation from Sa’di, although he is quoted elsewhere as having said: “I assure you, sir, that I do not understand a word of Persian; but I have translated Sa’di as La Motte translated Homer;”[4] that is, without any knowledge of the original language.
The German preoccupation with Oriental literature was to be largely a manifestation of Romanticism, but it actually began earlier, with Herder’s rhymed paraphrases of stories from Sa’di’s Gulistan made in the years 1761-64 from Gentius’ or Olearius’ translation. Three decades later, when he was engaged in the project of constructing a new humanism that would go beyond Greece and Christianity, Herder composed his Blumen aus Morgenlåndischen Dichtern gesammelt, which consisted for the most part of maxims taken from the Gulistan. He resisted the Romantic European fad of the Persian lyrist Hafiz, a movement that had been launched by Sir William Jones. In a posthumous work edited by his wife, Herder is quoted as saying: “An Hafyz’ Gesangen haben wir fast genug; Sa’di ist uns lehrreicher gewesen.”[5] This was hardly an accurate prognostication of the nineteenth century European fame of the two poets of Shiraz, but it betokened Herder’s ethical predilections, which looked back to the Enlightenment rather than forward to the Romantic age.
It was under the auspices of a deistic tolerance for religious unorthodoxy that Sa’di first appeared in America. One of the parables of the Bustan tells of how the Lord rebuked his Friend the patriarch Abraham for refusing, on religious grounds, proper hospitality to a Zoroastrian. The apologue had been paraphrased by Gentius (cited above as editor and translator of the Gulistan) in his Historia Judaica (1651), where it was attributed to one “Sadus” of unmentioned nationality.
Jeremy Taylor, the English divine, reading this “Jews’ Book,” as he called it, took up the parable and translated it into English at the end of the second edition of his Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying (1657). About one hundred years later, Benjamin Franklin, presumably having read the tale in the Discourse, succeeded in jocosely passing it off among the English literati as a missing chapter of the book of Genesis. In 1789, nearly thirty years after Franklin’s prank, a writer in the New Asiatick Miscellany remarked on the curious coincidence that the American statesman and the Persian poet Sa’di should have told the same story. Charges of plagiarism flew from all sides, but, had Franklin plagiarized from Taylor, from the “Jews’ Book” or from Sa’di? Early in the nineteenth century, Jeremy Taylor’s editor was still searching among Talmudists and Orientalists to discover the source of the parable. It finally took the testimony of Lord Teignmouth, one-time governor-general of India and biographer of Sir William Jones, to establish Sa’di’s claim to the ultimate authorship of the tale. Franklin’s editors have continued to retain it among the learned doctor’s works despite the fact that it is virtually a copy of an English translation of a Latin version of a Persian original. Franklin spoke aptly for the humanist tradition, however, when he said of this parable on religious persecution that he had composed it “on account of the importance of the moral, well worth being made known to all mankind.”[6]
It was also from the Bustan, but in Chardin’s version, that Joseph Addison obtained the “little Persian fable” on humility for item No. 293 of his Spectator. This apologue tells of a drop of rain that, as it falls into the ocean, bewails the oblivion awaiting it, only to be swallowed by an oyster and transformed into a pearl of great price. The young Sir William Jones, who was to become England’s greatest Orientalist, read Addison’s fable with so much pleasure that he was tempted to try his hand at turning it into Arabic, a language he was then just beginning to study. Sometime thereafter, when he made the acquaintance also of Persian, he was delightfully surprised to come upon it in Sa’di’s Bustan, whence he proceeded to render it into Latin, the, form in which it appears in his “Asiatick” poems.[7]
Thus, the Age of Reason had taken quite naturally to Sa’di; he was perhaps its favorite Oriental author. He provided the materials for the proper study of mankind, which is Man. A French savant, one Mons. Cardonne, whose Miscellany of Eastern Learning (containing selections from Sa’di among other quotable authors) was translated into English in 1771 – expressed the belief that:
the less the Orientals resemble us, the more necessary it is to examine them, in order to be convinced that the customs and opinions of mankind, though infinitely varied, change not man himself…[8]
Sir William Jones could readily subscribe to this philosophy, for he was himself a product of the Enlightenment and of a strictly classical education. Yet his own favorite among the Persian poets was Hafiz, whose passionate ghazals Jones saw as bringing a new and needed emotionalism into English poetry if they were properly translated. Hafiz would indeed inspire Goethe to compose a West Ostlicher Diwan in imitation of the Divan (collected poems) of Hafiz, and Emerson would rank him with Shakespeare as the essential poet. The rising Romanticism would certainly make Hafiz the essential Persian poet for nineteenth century Europeans — at least until a challenge came from that newcomer, Omar Khayyam.
Nevertheless, Jones’s high praise for Sa’di and his citations from him in his Persian Grammar were to inspire the first (if incomplete) English translation of the Gulistan, made by Stephen Sulivan in 1774.[9] And there would soon be a wholly new reason for the continued interest in Sa’di, namely his relevance to the geo-political needs of the expanding empire in India.
By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the East Indian Company (which had received its trading charter from Queen Elizabeth in 1600) had become so involved in the governance of India that it was felt necessary to bring its operations under the British Crown, Pitt’s India Act of 1784 did so, and in the process made Indian civilization a practical and direct concern of the general English public. Since Persian was the language of the Mogul courts, it was almost a patriotic duty for Englishmen to cultivate it. An anglicized cousin of Jean Jacques Rousseau believed that a knowledge of Persian would make for more efficient dealings with the perfidious natives, whether merchants or soldiers.[10] There was in fact presently launched, by Sir William Jones, his associates and his successors, a veritable crash program of Persian studies, both in India and at home.
In the education of Englishmen in the ways of their Moslem colonials, Sa’di played a very important role. His didactic works had exerted an enormous influence upon the popular Islamic mind, and they were key for unlocking the psychology of both the rulers and the ruled in Moslem India. One of the first publications to come out of the new Indian educational program was A Compendium of Ethics, the text and translation of the Pandnameh erroneously attributed to Sa’di.[11] This was followed by such compilations as The Persian Interpreter and The Persian Moonshee (Scribe), which contained the inevitable quotations from Sa’di and other Persian authors. Some of these books were especially designed for training civil servants. One, a bowdlerized Gulistan, was intended for use by Christian children.[12] All were aimed at making British rule in India more efficient.
In his new European career, Sa’di had more to do with India, whither his fame had spread, than with Persia, where he was born. Moreover, he was more likely to be called upon to underscore the differences than the similarities among mankind. In other words, the Sa’di of the Enlightenment had given way to the Sa’di of the colonial age.
[1] It is of course possible that some of Sa’di’s fables made their way to the West before his name did. W. A. Clouston cites a close analogue to Sa’di’s story of the astrologer (Chapter IV, tale 11 of the Gulistan) in an old English jest book, Tales and Quicke Answeres, published in 1535. (Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers, London, 1890, p. 37)
[2] 2. Andre du Ryer, tr. Gulistan ou L’Emprise Des Roses, Compose par SADI, PRINCE des Poetes Turcs et Persans (Paris, 1634, avec Privilege du Roi).
[3] This early phase of Persian studies in Europе is covered in Arthur F.J. Remy’s The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany, Columbia University Germanic Studies, Vol. I, No. 4 (New York, 1901).
[4] The early European vogue of Sa’di is revealed in Henri Massé’s Essai sur le Poete Saadi suivi d’une Bibliographie (Paris, 1919), “Bibliographie.
[5] Remy, op. cit., P. 19.
[6] For a full account of this episode see Duncan Forbes, A Grammary of the Persian Language (London, 1876), p. 164 Ef.
[7] This story is told in Gentleman’s Magazine, XLV (Jan. 1775), 39.
[8] 2 vols. (London, 1771), I, ii.
[9] Select Fables from Gulistan or the Bed of Roses (London, 1774), Preface.
[10] I have dealt with the roles of Jones and the East India Company in the growth of Persian studies in England in my Persian Poetry in England and America: a Two Hundred Year History (Delmar, N.Y., 1977), Chapter 1. See also Arthur J. Arberry, British Contributions to Persian Studies (London, 1942).
[11] This translation, by Francis Gladwin, was first issued by Stewart and Cooper in Calcutta, 1788 and later embodied in The Flowers of Persian Literature by S. Rousseau (London, 1801). But see Chapter 4, below on authenticity of Pandnameh.
[12] Cited by Edward Edwards, A Catalogue of the Persian Printed Books in the British Museum (London, 1922), p. 558.
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