The Gulistan: Sa'di

The Gulistan (1258 CE) is a landmark of Persian literature, perhaps its single most influential work of prose. The title--meaning, "The Rose Garden"--symbolizes the delicate cultivation of beauty and wisdom, presented as an anthology (literally "flower gathering" in Greek) of aphoristic tales.

The minimalist plots of The Gulistan are concise in their expression and psychological insight, but layered in meaning. As Eastwick comments in his introduction to the work, "Each word of Sa'di has seventy-two meanings." Sufi teachings are encoded in entertaining anecdotes, parables, and tales, widely quoted for their wisdom (including by Thoreau in Walden). Its "poetry of ideas" deals with virtually every major practical or moral issue, much of it directed toward rulers (in the tradition of the "mirrors for princes" genre).

In Representative Men, Ralph Waldo Emerson includes Sa'di in the company of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Homer, and Milton. Emerson also wrote a preface to The Gulistan in which he says that Sa'di "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 synonym for this grace."

Herman Melville owned a copy of The Gulistan and left his markings for later scholars to study. Dorothee Finklestein notes that these markings (contra Emerson) emphasize "fear, envy, malignity, ingratitude, false friends, hypocrisy, loneliness, the abuse of power, frustrated hopes, death, and, above, all, poverty." Thus recalling "the power of blackness" which Melville detected in Hawthorne, he "marked what Emerson passed over, the defeat of beauty by ugliness."

Nevertheless, Finklestein goes on to suggest that the titular character of Melville's "Rose Farmer" is an allusion to Sa'di: a figure whose superficial cheerfulness begets him popularity and financial reward. In like manner, Ishmael concedes that "in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side; the country" (Moby-Dick, 94).

Note: For this meetup, it is recommended (though not required) to read the translation by Edward Eastwick.

Gulistan (translated by Edward Eastwick):

• Google books

Supplemental:

• Melville's Marginalia
• Preface to Gulistan by Ralph Waldo Emerson
• "Saadi" poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson
• A Man Who Is Thrown to the Sea
• A Man Who Goes Blind
• A Man Who Got His Revenge

Extracts:

• "...take charitable example from the Persian, who in his comment upon the Icelandic version of the fervid orientalisms of Sadi and Hafiz, made humane allowance for the inherent difficulties and numb fingers of the translator in penning it." ("The Marquis de Grandvin")
• "Recurs to me a Persian rhyme: / In Pera late an Asian man, / With stately cap of Astracan, / I knew in arbored coffee-house / On bluff above the Bosphorus. / Strange lore was his, and Saadi’s wit: / Over pipe and Mocha long we’d sit / Discussing themes which thrive in shade." (Clarel, 4.16)
• "I wended from this prosperous Persian / Who, verily, seemed in life rewarded / For sapient prudence not amiss, / Nor transcendental essence hoarded / In hope of quintessential bliss: / No, never with painstaking throes / Essays to crystallize the rose." ("The Rose Farmer")
• "The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up—flaked up, with rose-water snow." (Moby-Dick, 39)

This meetup is part of a series on The Crescent and the Cross.