The Persian Poet
Mosleh al-Din Ibn Abdollāh Saʿdi (d. 1291, Shiraz), known as the Master of Eloquence (ostād-e sokhan), is the most widely celebrated poet and moralist scholar of Persian erudite culture, and his Golestān remains the most influential classical Persian work over the European literatures of the Victorian and Romantic eras, when mysterious tales of the Orient were finding their way to the West, and Persia was fantasized about through images of heavenly rose gardens, fairy-like beloveds, and romantic poems. Saʿdi’s harmonious prose style and his lyrical and mystical poetry were, and still are, considered the perfect model of ease in using elegant language. He compared his own words to sugar in sweetness and pleasantnessFootnote 1 and called himself Saʿdi-e shirin-zabān Footnote 2 (of dulcet language). Hundreds of his verses and witty phrases have entered the Persian language and are still commonly used as expressions and idioms today.Footnote 3 Beside his Divān of poetry, the Bustān (The Orchard), written in masnavi verse in 1257, and the Golestān (The Rose Garden), a collection of anecdotes in ornate prose mingled with fragments of poetry written in 1258, were indispensable sources of education at traditional Perso-Islamic schools (madraseh) not only in Iran, but also in Transoxiana and Mughal India for centuries. India, under the governance of Muslim rulers—the Delhi Sultanates (1206–1526) and the Mughals (1526–1857)—had chosen Persian as the official language of the court for administration and political exchange. Juan Cole’s estimation of the Persian-speaking population in Iran and India in the beginning of the eighteenth century reveals that there were around seven times more readers of Persian in Mughal India than in Safavid Iran (1503–1736).Footnote 4 In fact, many masterpieces of Persian literature, including Saʿdi’s Golestān and Bustān, were very popular among Indo-Persian literati, and the number of commentaries written on them in India exceeded by far the ones produced in Iran proper. This continued in Persian and Urdu until the twentieth century. Saʿdi’s works were the subject of imitations and literary interpretations by many Indian poets, e.g. Qamar al-Din Mennat Dehlavi’s (d. 1869) Chamanestān (The Green Meadow) and Shekarestān (The Sugarland), Mollā Ṭarzi’s Ma'dan al-Javāher (The Gemstone Mine) dedicated to the Mughal king Jahāngir (d. 1627), and 'Enāyat Allāh Kanbuh Dehlavi’s (d. 1649) collection of anecdotes entitled Bahār-e Dānesh (The Spring of Knowledge).Footnote 5
As we know from biographical sources, Saʿdi was educated in Islamic theology, literature and history at Nezāmiyyeh in Baghdad. According to his writings, he had gone on pilgrimage to Mecca and traveled to different countries in the East and the West: India, Syria, Egypt and Anatolia. In one hundred verses in the eighth chapter of the Bustān, Saʿdi described his observations of the Hindu rituals and Brahman prayers for honoring their great idol god in the temple of Somnath and explained how he managed to escape death and save his own life as a Muslim.Footnote 6 Although recent scholarship is skeptical about the likelihood of Saʿdi’s trip to India,Footnote 7 his narrative of visiting that country could evoke a sense of familiarity with Hindus and their rituals, and awaken a certain sense of closeness with him for the Indo-Muslim elites and South Asian Persian scholars who introduced his works to the British readership in the colonial period in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In fact, Saʿdi’s fame did not reach Europe from Persia, but through the British institutions of colonial India, and the very first complete English translations of the Golestān were published by professors of Persian in Calcutta, Bengal.
This paper examines the aims and methods of translation in the first four complete renderings of the Golestān from a comparative perspective. We will see how British Orientalists’ endeavor to familiarize themselves with Persian language and culture in the late eighteenth century led to the introduction of the Golestān as a canonical literary text. Who were the translators and how did their approach change towards this particular text? Where were the native Indo-Persian scholars placed within the translation process? How close were English translations to Saʿdi’s original text? This paper answers these questions by providing an analysis of methods and aims of translation vis-à-vis the style in English versions of the Persian Golestān.
British Thirst for the Orient and the Persian Monshis
After the founding of the East India Company (1600–1874) for the aim of facilitating the commercial and political agenda of the British Empire in the East, the Company’s members and the civil servants of British institutions in South Asia needed training in Indian local languages for rendering administrative and military services. The British had adopted Indian administration systems and judicial laws; but they found native Indians unreliable and searched for independent access to local written sources, which were mostly recorded in Persian.Footnote 8
The necessity of linguistic education inspired the setting up of educational centers for promoting Oriental Studies in Bengal. Warren Hastings (d. 1818), the first Governor General of the East India Company, launched “Calcutta Muhammadan College” or “Madraseh ʿĀliyeh” (recorded in British texts as “Madrasah Aliah”) in 1780, where a wide variety of courses were taught on astronomy, mathematics, theology, Islamic law, grammar, Arabic, and Persian. Hastings assigned an Indian Muslim scholar named Mollā Majd al-Din as the director and head preceptor of the College. After arriving in Calcutta in 1783, the British linguist Sir William Jones (d. 1794) promoted the idea of creating a scientific research pole in Bengal for expanding the study of Oriental languages and literature, and he founded the Asiatic Society in 1784. Fort William College was set up in Calcutta in 1800 by Lord Wellesley and became an eminent educational institution with a department of Indian languages, a solid linguistic pedagogy, and a board of examiners not only for acquiring local knowledge, but also for introducing the local people to British culture and principles. As we read in the Visitor’s speech in Fort William College in 1806:
The College will not only open to the learned in Europe ample sources of information on all subjects of oriental history and science, but will afford to various nations and tribes of India and specially to those which compose the body of our Indian subjects, [a] more favorable view and more just and accurate conception of the British Character, principles and laws than they have hitherto [been] enabled to form.Footnote 9
The Haileybury College was subsequently founded in 1806 in England and the teaching of Asian languages and literatures continued to develop under the support of the East India Company at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the list of Indian languages taught at these colleges, Persian was of high importance due to its use for correspondence with the Mughal court. Every civil servant, therefore, applied to study this language. In several statements by Claudius Buchanan (d. 1815), the Vice-Rector of Fort William College, attention was drawn to the importance of Persian by referring to its territorial distribution, its connection to administration, and its prestige.Footnote 10
In order to build a solid pedagogical curriculum for teaching Persian at British institutions, William Jones put forward an innovative approach that would help the East India Company employees master the language for communication, translation, and responding to official letters with fluency and elegance within a short time.Footnote 11 Before his arrival in India, Jones had learnt Persian and Arabic with the aid of a native Bengali scholar named Mirzā Sheykh Eʿtesām al-Din (d. c. 1800), who was sent to England between 1766 and 1768 as a delegate of the Mughal king, Shāh ʿĀlam II (d. 1806).Footnote 12 With him, Jones had read and translated parts of Persian texts into Latin, French, and English, and later prepared a Persian grammar book in 1771, entitled A Grammar of the Persian Language. The book had a Persian title as well, written on the cover in Indian Nasta’liq type: Ketāb-e Shekarestān dar Nahvi zabān-e pārsi tasnif-e Yunos-e Oxfordi,Footnote 13 literally meaning “The book of Shekarestān [the Chest of Sugar as Jones translated elsewhere] on Persian language grammar, written by Yunos of Oxford.” The Persian title was different from the English one and its content displayed Jones’ endeavor to adapt the presentation of his work to Persian book culture. It also revealed his acquaintance with the tradition of entitling Persian books by metaphorical names that referred to delightful places, e.g. Golestān and Bustān, or tastes and feelings, e.g. sweet. To Persianize his own name, Jones used the Persian equivalent of Jones, “Yunos,” and “Oxfordi” as a surname, like the Persian surnames that referred to the city or province people came from, such as “Shirazi” used for Saʿdi, literally meaning from Shiraz.
Jones’ book became a pioneering model for the Persian language manuals prepared by professors of the Asiatic Society and Fort William College afterwards. In his method, inspired from his own experience of learning languages, the students would attain reading skills with correct pronunciation from a native speaker, and then work on grammar and vocabulary using dictionaries and manuals. In the preface, Jones discussed his knowledge of Voltaire’s translations of Saʿdi’s poems,Footnote 14 as well as Georgius Gentius’ first Latin translation of the Golestān, the Bed of Roses,Footnote 15 published in 1651 in Amsterdam, which also contained the first edited and printed version of the Golestān’s text in Persian. As an important exercise for language acquisition, Jones explicitly suggested translating passages from the Golestān:
The first book that I would recommend to him [the student] is the Golestān, or Bed of Roses, a work which is highly esteemed in the East, and of which there are several translations in the languages of Europe. The manuscripts of this book are very common; and by comparing them with the printed edition of Gentius, he will soon learn the beautiful flowing hand used in Persia, which consists of bold strokes and flourishes, and cannot be imitated by our types. It will then be a proper time for him to read some short and easy chapter in this work, and to translate it into his native language with the utmost exactness; let him then lay aside the original, and after a proper interval let him turn the same chapter back into Persian by the assistance of the grammar and dictionary: let him afterwards compare his second translation with the original, and correct its faults according to that model. This is the exercise so often recommended by the old rhetoricians, by which a student will gradually acquire the style and manner of any author, whom he desires to imitate, and by which almost any language may be learned in six months with ease and pleasure.Footnote 16
Jones’ suggested method clearly insisted on developing certain rhetorical skills that went beyond the expected outcome of language acquisition, by proposing to emulate Saʿdi’s style as a classic poet, through a two-level translation process from and into the target language. Jones talked of rhythm and metrics (ʿaruz) in Persian poetry, which proves his awareness of the importance of the elaborate style based on rhyming in Persian epistolary prose (inshāʿ) used in official letters and court administration, and of the significance of the Golestān as a model text in this genre of writing for Persians. Had Jones’ Persian tutor alerted him to the importance of learning this particular literary style through the Golestān? Most of the examples provided in Jones’ book regarding grammatical rules, the old rhyming forms of verbs, and compound adjectives were couplets from renowned Persian poets rather than sentences used in everyday language. Through this manual, the employees of the East India Company could learn about Persian language and literature even before arriving in India. Jones also emphasized learning different handwriting styles in manuscripts by the help of a native tutor or writer, a monshi:
At some leisure hour, he [the student] may desire his monshi or writer to transcribe a section from the Golestān, or a fable of Cāshefi,Footnote 17 in the common broken hand used in India, which he will learn perfectly in a few days by comparing all its turns and contractions with the more regular hands of the Arabs and Persians.Footnote 18
The monshis (written by Europeans as moonshee or munshi) were Indian learned scholars and secretaries from different regions of India, and of diverse religions, recruited to work with the Europeans as language instructors. The profession of a monshi —the Arabic term for the Persian dabir—had an old history in the Persianate culture and was succeeded from the dabiri tradition in pre-Islamic Iran; it concerned the “men of pen” and court administrators who served in state offices (divāns) and were in charge of official correspondence and the preparation of books. This profession survived at the Perso-Islamic courts as the translator and secretary of epistolary writing (inshāʿ) in both Arabic and Persian languages. The monshis received a special education that encompassed scientific and linguistic erudition, bureaucratic ethics (akhlāq), adab (literature), handwriting styles and calligraphy.Footnote 19 As the most knowledgeable courtiers in the royal service, they produced significant texts in Persian prose, including compendiums for princes and kings on how to behave and rule with justice (the “mirrors for princes”). The elaboration of Persian prose from simple (nasr-e sādeh) to rhymed (nasr-e mosajja’), ornate (nasr-e masnuʿ or fanni) and over-decorated styles (motakallaf) is in fact indebted to them. In the Indo-Persian context, this career was performed with certain cultural modifications, especially in the colonial period when the monshis began to collaborate with their British superiors (sāheb) in their official projects, as well as in their private research as native tutors of Indian languages and mediators of local knowledge. The program of Oriental Studies and the learning materials at Fort William were created in interaction with them, based on the curricula at local traditional schools.Footnote 20 Following Jones’ recommendation, the European professors and teachers at British institutions in India learned Oriental languages through their associations with the monshis. Likewise, translation with their aid and supervision became an established tradition for improving language and writing skills. Based on the pragmatic needs of the British program for learning languages, the monshi manuals on writing techniques such as the Inshāʾ Harkaran were soon edited and translated by the East India Company to serve as a model for the British administrators who had to deal with sophisticated and poetic terminology in imperial orders (farmān) and letters.
From 1770 to 1800, printing presses arrived at Calcutta, and lexicons, grammars, and works of literature from the Persian, Sanskrit, and vernacular traditions began to be publishedFootnote 21 at the publishing houses in Bengal.Footnote 22 For practical reasons, the translation and edition of canonical prose texts were privileged over poetry. The publishing industry in India contributed to the growth of Persian prose literature, narrative texts in particular, including historiographies and fiction, such as the Hātam-nāmeh,Footnote 23 Tuti-nāmeh,Footnote 24 Anvār-e Soheyli Footnote 25 by Kāshefi, and the Golestān. Monshis also got involved in the process of exploiting oral literature and recording it in written form. Many of the translations of Indo-Persian texts prepared and published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were due to the close co-operation of the British with their monshis, whose proper names would rarely appear on the cover of the books. In this regard, Saʿdi’s Golestān was no exception. William Jones had published partial translations from the Golestān and Bustān in his famous articles: Poeseos Asiaticae Commentariorum (1774), the “Traité sur la poésie orientale” (1770) and Asiatick Miscellany, a Calcutta periodical edited by Francis Gladwin (d. 1813). Although he acknowledged that it would not be possible to transmit all the beauty of Persian literature without the help of the monshis, because “the sweetness of sound cannot be determined by sight, and many words are soft and musical in the mouth of a Persian,”Footnote 26 he did not name the monshi(s) who assisted him. The “style” was of peculiar interest to him as it could be perceived and admired in Persian, but it didn’t seem transmittable to English readers except with the help of the monshis. Jones’ translations were not always loyal to the original text; he occasionally appeared selective towards cultural terms in the text or added explanatory phrases to his translation to provide a more accessible image to the British reader. For instance, where Jones translated the famous poetical fragment taken from the introduction of the Golestān on the advantage of the good company surrounding Saʿdi and the scented clay from a beloved, he extended the short tale by adding more explanatory sentences to it that provided more fluency in his prose, explaining what the unctuous clay was and how Persians used it in baths instead of soap.Footnote 27 This meant opting for a rather free style of translation. Jones believed that the vast variety of Persian idioms, aesthetic images and wordy styles in Persian would pale in translation, lose their elegance, or sound absurd due to their lack of cultural signification in European cultures.Footnote 28 Finally, his translations of poetic fragments from the Golestān were in English prose and typed in the same paragraph, with no differentiation in their presentation.Footnote 29
The Golestān, highlighted as a highly esteemed book in Persian culture, became a companion to Jones’ grammar book and was among the first primary sources in the Persian language provision for British officials. It became so popular that some monshis at Fort William College were assigned to translate it into other Indian vernaculars in order for it to be used as a sample text for other languages as well. Monshi Mir Shir ʿAli Afsus (d. 1809) translated the book into Hindustani.Footnote 30 There also exists an unpublished manuscript of the Golestān in Hindustani among the manuscripts that Sir William Jones sent to Sir Joseph Banks and the Royal Society in 1792 for use by European scholars, which is supposed to have been done by Jones himself, as a linguistic exercise.Footnote 31 Selections and partial translations of it were repeatedly published in course books for British institutions in India until the beginning of the nineteenth century before the first complete translations of the text appeared, which were also aimed at teaching the technical use of Persian language.Footnote 32
English Translators of the Golestān in the Nineteenth Century
Francis Gladwin (d. 1813)
The history of complete translations of the Golestān into English begins with Francis Gladwin’s The Gulistan of Musle-Huddeen Sheik Saadi of Shiraz, published with the Hindoostanee Press in Calcutta in 1806. Gladwin was one of the founders of the Asiatic Society in Bengal and one of the first Persian instructors at Fort William (1801–6). Before his translation of the Golestān appeared, he had already written manuals on Persian literature, among which The Persian Moonshee in two volumes was noteworthy: it included several chapters on Persian syntax and grammar, idiomatic phrases, dialogues with transliteration in Roman characters for accurate pronunciation, and several passages from Saʿdi’s Bustān and Golestān in Persian with transliterations and translations into accessible English. This book was republished and used as an indispensable manual for Persian at Fort William for forty years. Its title was ended to signify metaphorically that the book would function as a companion or a Persian monshi for students of Persian. Francis Gladwin’s rendering of the Golestān included Saʿdi’s preface (dibācheh) and the eight chapters in unadorned English prose. But the particularity of Saʿdi’s prose style, its ornate language and use of rhyme, its alternation with poetry, its wide range of literary devices and pleasant twists were ignored.
The edition had no foreword by Gladwin himself, but some footnotes were added to explain certain ambiguities for the English reader. The work was perceived by the British as a compendium of moral advice and had great success in the West. Many reprinted editions of it were published in England and the United States, with a preface by Ralph Waldo Emerson (d. 1882) and an essay on the “life and character of Shaikh Saʿdi” by James Ross (d. 1831), which made the volume a well-rounded source for the general English-speaking public. Gladwin’s edition had a second volume, The Gūlistān of Sādy, containing the Persian text with a bilingual lexicography in English and Persian for the students of Persian at Fort William College, which received less attention and remained almost unknown in Europe.Footnote 33
James Dumoulin
In 1807, a year after Gladwin’s rendering, James Dumoulin published The Goolistān of the Celebrated Musleh-ud-Deen of Shirauz, Surnamed Sheikh Sādi. Dumoulin had begun his work of translation in 1804 and had only learned about Gladwin’s work when he was pursuing the publication of his own translation. Dumoulin’s translation displayed an important difference in presentation and purpose from Gladwin’s: in his work the English and Persian texts were published in parallel on the same page, with explanatory footnotes on each page for the definition of Persian words and literary elements. He admitted that his intention was to prepare a course book that could be serviceable to students of Persian and provide some facility to the attainment of this “essential language.”Footnote 34 In his translation, Dumoulin kept some Persian literary expressions which did not have English equivalents, such as hekmat (written as hickmut), qetʿeh (written as kitteh), Masnavi (written as musnevee), beyt and pand (written as pund). Although he found translating Saʿdi’s words difficult, he
resolved to make an attempt, not less with a view to convince that, through want of assiduity, the investigation of equivalent idioms is too hastily abandoned by the majority, than to present to the public, a work, esteemed by teachers of the Persian language, rudimental, and consequently put into the hands of beginners, as furnishing all kinds of grammatical and logical examples in prose and in verse.Footnote 35
At the same time, Dumoulin criticized the fact that the “translation” had been undertaken by many with the view to instruct, which had resulted in ignorance of the literary style of the original:
Instead of a translation, which alone can teach, the tenses and persons are not preserved, and in lieu, a paraphrase is given: or in other words, the ideas contained in the original are faintly communicated in the translator’s own words and diction; supplying terms which do not exist in the text, and omitting those which are expressed, thereby losing the idiom of the original and consequently giving a different turn to the sentence by the use of different tenses and cases.Footnote 36
Dumoulin claimed to have been attentive to preserving the tenses, persons, and syntax of the original, as well as marking the genitive case, which he considered necessary to the acquirement of pure Persian. With regard to the translation of the Arabic passages and verses from the Koran in the Golestān, he had been guided by monshis and mowlavis (experts in Arabic, written in the text as maulavis), though he affirmed, “in consequence of their dull habits, no one in a hundred can give an accurate definition of many of the sentences in Arabic in the Golestān.”Footnote 37 He thus indicated his lack of trust towards the group of monshis who were not helpful in delivering a clear understanding of texts of high literary value, which could be a reference to the British stereotype according to which Indians were imprecise and incompetent.
Dumoulin was aware of manuscript variants and therefore studied three different copies: an old manuscript of the Golestān dated 1023 H./1644, J. H. Harrington’s copy of the Golestān used for his translations in the two-volume book of The Persian and Arabic Works of Sādee published in 1791, and Gladwin’s translation of the Golestān, which had appeared a few months before. The end of Dumoulin’s book contains a list of the people who had subscribed to receive a printed copy of the work, in which sixteen copies were reserved for Fort William and four were requested for Richard Marquis Wellesley, the head of the College. The translator dedicated his work to J. H. Harrington out of gratitude for his work, which had helped the students of Persian in Bengal gain acquaintance with the Persian poet.
James Ross (d. 1831)
Around sixteen years after the aforementioned translations, in 1823, James Ross presented a new rendering of the Golestān, entitled Sadi: Gulistan or Flower Garden and dedicated it to the chairman and director of the East India Company. The third English translator of the Golestān was a medical doctor surgeon who had served in India, at Fort Saint George, and in Calcutta from 1783 to 1797. Ross also remained a member of the Royal Asiatic Society from 1802 until the end of his life. He wrote an important introductory essay to his book, where he recalled his experience of studying Persian with monshis and learning about Saʿdi’s works thirty years before, when it was customary to translate any classic which the monshi recommended for his perusal. In his essay, Ross presented a list of twenty-two works by the Persian poet, described his relations with the court, sketched his extensive travels and made parallel comparisons to similar cases in the English culture such as the case of Irishmen and Christian missionaries in the East. He introduced some Persian poetic customs such as the takhallos (when the poet mentions his own name in the last stanza of his poem), and thought that the western poet Abraham Cowley (d. 1667) had adopted this Persian tradition in his own poetry.Footnote 38 Also at the end of his book, Ross followed the style of the Persian scribe, and added a line of prayer for himself (“May I carve…”), asking the readers to send their prayers to his soul:
“Oh thou who peruses this book, ask the mercy of God on the author of it, his forgiveness on the transcriber. Petition for whatever charitable gift thou mayst require for thyself, and implore pardon on the owner,” May I carve thy prayer on the English translator? “The book is finished through the favor of the Lord God Paramount and the bestower of all good!”Footnote 39
Ross’ introductory essay presented invaluable information about the poet in English for the first time. Referring to Persian biographies such as the Tazkerat al-Shoʿarā (Biography of Poets) of Dowlat Shāh Samarqandi (d. 1494 or 1507), and Persian and Arabic commentaries of the Golestān, also basing himself on Saʿdi’s other works, Ross introduced the poet as a person of eminence in wisdom and learning who spent the first thirty years of his life studying and gathering knowledge. In the following thirty years, he gained experience, traveled, and disseminated knowledge, and for the remainder of his life, he became a pious recluse.Footnote 40
A noteworthy detail found in Ross’ essay is the name of the monshi who played a major role in the preparation of Harrington’s Calcutta edition of The Persian and Arabic works of Sādee in 1791–92, based on four manuscript copies: that monshi was Mowlavi Mohamad Rashid.Footnote 41 It is noticeable that Ross, in contrast to Dumoulin, acknowledged Harrington’s monshi and his role with gratitude and gave him high credit as a learned Indian scholar. Ross cited from Mowlavi Mohamad Rashid that a certain Ali Ibn Ahmad of Bistun was considered the original collector and editor of Saʿdi’s Kolliyāt (complete works) in 726–34 H., around thirty-three to forty-one years after Saʿdi’s death.Footnote 42 Ross then shared his own findings about another copy of the Kolliyāt, deposited at the India House in London by Sir Harford Jones (d. 1847) and dated earlier than Ali Ibn Ahmad’s collated copy, recommending this manuscript as a valuable reference for further studies on Saʿdi. Ross also claimed to have in his possession a two-volume manuscript copy of the Kolliyāt that belonged to the royal library of the Mughal king, Shāh Jahān (d. 1666), and stated that his translation was based on that royal copy.Footnote 43
In his essay, Ross presented a good knowledge of other existing editions and translations of the text, and juxtaposed the Persian text in the Latin Rosarium Politicum of Gentius (1618–87) printed in Amsterdam, with the ones printed in Calcutta. He compared his own translation with Gladwin’s and suggested that Gladwin’s rendering, which had already been patronized by the professors of the East India company’s colleges, was not based on a specific Persian copy from India, but on the Gentius edition. He also made another claim that significantly clarifies his views on Gladwin’s work: he announced that he had spent a few months in Calcutta in 1796–97 and put his own translation of the Golestān in Gladwin’s hands in order to obtain some feedback from him. He was then informed that Gladwin had projected a translation of the book as well. Ross’ comparison of his own work to Gladwin’s was meant to give his work the same authority as Gladwin’s, and even show it to be superior to Gladwin’s. He considered Gladwin’s work an “indelicate allusion” to Saʿdi’s text, criticizing him for obviating certain elements from the Persian text in chapter five of the Golestān on the subject of “love and youth,” which replaced a male character with a female one in a tale about a homosexual relationship. Through this comparison, Ross explained his own strategy towards some occasional instances of indelicacy of expression in the Persian text, by opting for leaving out the translation of a few words.Footnote 44
Ross’ decision to elide unsavory passages seems to contradict his claim to greater accuracy compared to Gladwin’s rendering. In fact, both these translators altered the text or removed parts from it, and their euphemistic approach would end with a similar result. His intention for preparing this new translation was also aimed at students of Persian and he therefore found it necessary to model his work on the East India Company’s colleges’ taste. He still tried to preserve “as much as common decency permitted”Footnote 45 from Saʿdi’s text so that the college students would not be disappointed. Ross’ translation of the Golestān, just like the previous two, was entirely in English prose; he considered verses repetitive since they retransmitted the same sense as in prose, and believed that the translation should not “violate simplicity on the one hand, nor sink into tameness on the other; and for that purpose, a prose translation, even of poetry, was preferred to rhyme or blank verse.”Footnote 46 But he still codified verse passages with commas, the Arabic ones in italics, and the additional words in English that were not present in the Persian text in brackets. Just like Dumoulin, Ross expressed his awareness of the difficulties of rendering the author’s thoughts with spirit and fidelity and thought it was almost impossible to translate accurately from Oriental languages into English because of cultural differences and the diversity of idiomatic phrases, “just as the translation of Arabic passages was difficult due to the ambiguity of tenses.”Footnote 47 His prose presented some literary value, but was unsuccessful in surpassing Gladwin’s work. His introductory essay, in contrast, was perceived as a well-rounded source on Saʿdi—though containing some errors—and was added to the later editions of Gladwin’s translation.
The three aforementioned translators of the Golestān chose a range of strategies to provide their works with authenticity: consulting several earlier-dated manuscripts, making reference to authentic bibliographical books on the life of the poet and his literary style, and referring to the monshis in general as the native sources of knowledge. None of the three translators rendered the verse passages into English verse, which could be because of their personal limits in translation or literary skills. They remarked upon the difficulties of being loyal to the original Persian text in their English renderings due to cultural differences and they applied censorship in various ways and at various levels. The translation was aimed at preparing a course book for the technical use of Persian at the service of the East India Company, and was thus adapted to the learners’ basic linguistic levels. In the third complete version by Ross, the first attempts towards a philological approach was made via reference to Persian biographical sources (tazkereh) for introducing Saʿdi as a poet.
Edward Backhouse Eastwick (d. 1883)
In 1852, Edward Eastwick, a member of the Asiatic Societies of Paris and Bombay and a professor of Oriental languages (1845–57) at the East India College, Haileybury, presented his The Gulistān of Sadi from a manuscript copy of the library of the Royal Asiatic Society. Eastwick had spent his youth in India, acquired an extensive knowledge of Indian languages and worked as an interpreter in the British army. As a language professor at Haileybury, he had prepared a new edition of the Persian text of the Golestān a few years before his translation appeared, which was praised by Duncan Forbes, professor of Oriental languages at King’s College, for having a good vocabulary and for dividing the work into sentences by means of punctuation. Eastwick’s rendering of the Golestān was the first English translation that followed to some extent the literary style of the Persian original since it was in both verse and prose. Eastwick had prepared an introductory preface on Saʿdi where he talked of the great reputation of “the immortal poet”Footnote 48 that surpassed by far all other “poets in the East” and his works that were the first lessons taught at schools. The book included a chapter about the life of the author, a proper word-by-word translation of a chapter about Saʿdi from a Persian biographical treatise of the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century entitled the Ātashkadeh-ye Āzar.Footnote 49 In order to give more authority to his work, Eastwick had his translation attentively compared to the original by a scholarly monshi who mastered both Persian and English.Footnote 50 The translator aimed to establish the authority of his work by referring to the Persian monshi, while yet again not giving the monshi himself credit through a reference to his proper name.
This “Edition de lux” had a cover with the Persian title Golestān-e Sheykh Saʿdi Shirazi engraved in the centre of a shamseh (circular form of illumination mimicking the sun) in golden Persian calligraphy. Two miniature paintings from the Persian manuscript were found in the opening and ending pages of the book: one illustrated the scene of a typical Oriental classroom (maktab), with the teacher sitting at the top center and the students sitting around him, and the other was an illustration of a master and a monshi disciple in a kārkhāneh where manuscripts were copied, along with animals and birds in a natural setting. The title of the first chapter on the “Life of Saʿdi” from the Ātashkadeh was typed in the heading part (sarlowh) decorated with Indo-Persian illuminations. A second frontispiece appeared at the beginning of Saʿdi’s introduction to the Golestān (dibācheh) with arabesques (khatāyi floral motifs). All pictures were in full color.
In the preface, Eastwick commented on Gladwin’s and Ross’ translations as well as Sémelet’s French rendering and criticized them for being too free and, in some cases, improper.Footnote 51 Providing meticulous examples from those renderings, he criticized their level of understanding of the Persian text and translation methods. By providing concrete examples of mistranslations and omissions of certain lines in the original, and by making their misunderstandings evident, Eastwick tried to prove that both Gladwin and Ross had lost the meaning of Saʿdi’s words. He ranked the quality of the translations, placing Sémelet’s French version in first place, Gladwin’s second, Ross’ as the third, and the Latin version by Gentius in fourth place. At the same time, he praised Ross’ resourceful essay and quoted his list of Saʿdi’s works. Eastwick brought up the importance of rendering Persian poetry into English verse and tried to make his translation as loyal as possible in terms of the communication of meaning, meter, alliteration, and intertextual references. Persian words were written in Arabic letters and with Roman transliteration, Arabic passages were set in italics, and numerous explanatory footnotes—sometimes taking up half the page—clarified ambiguities pertaining to Persian culture and literature. Eastwick’s literary talent made his translation aesthetically pleasing. At this stage, he was certainly aware of the importance of style in Persian prose and was also conscious of the differences of aesthetic criteria in Persian and English literature; he explained a few years later, in his other translation work, Kāshefi’s Anvār-e Soheyli:
It is impossible not to perceive that those very characteristics of style, which form its chiefest beauties in the eye of Persian taste, will appear to the European reader as ridiculous blemishes. The undeviating equipoise of bi-propositional sentences, and oftentimes their length and intricacy; and hyperbole and sameness of metaphor and the rudeness and unskillfulness of the plots of some of the stories, cannot but be wearisome and repulsive to the better and simpler judgment of the West.Footnote 52
Eastwick made a great effort to render the Persian text into English with style. In his work, the literary style was not an imitation of the Persian style, but was in accordance with the tastes of his English audience. Persian poetic and rhyming prose was translated into fluent English prose, Persian couplets into English rhyming stanzas, which still allowed the English reader of the mid-nineteenth century (who had already been familiarized with Saʿdi through Gladwin’s rendering and other translations) to appreciate its intrinsic literary merits. Nevertheless, certain scholars of Persian like Edward FitzGerald (1809–83) called Eastwick’s verse “wretched” and considered the style of his prose to be “on the wrong tack” altogether.Footnote 53 Others praised it for its charming combination of Persian book art and narrative literature, as well as for the “literality” of the translation; it was presented to Queen Victoria of England in 1853 and was apparently very much admired.Footnote 54
The Persian text of the Golestān was continuously re-edited and reprinted by professors of Fort William and the East India Company in the years that followed. Explanatory appendices, bilingual glossaries, and chapters on the text’s literary value were prepared with the help of the monshis. In some versions, diacritics were included to mark the short vowels for easier pronunciation. In others, further information was provided on Persian and Arabic poetics, metrics, and rhetoric for the use of students.Footnote 55 The large number of editions of the Persian text demonstrated its continuous popularity; among the English translations, the ones by Gladwin and Eastwick were the most successful, and were reprinted several times in Europe and America.
English Translations in Comparison
A glimpse at the English renderings of the Golestān in the first half of the nineteenth century reveals evident differences of expression and an undeniable evolution in methods of translation. Despite the simplicity of the language in all four translations, there is a tendency to produce prose of increasing literary value, and Eastwick’s version develops this attentiveness in the translation of the verse passages into verse. In all four complete English translations, the number of tales varies in each chapter, perhaps due to the differences in the consulted manuscripts regarding the number of the tales, their irregular divisions and varied titles, or because of the translators’ decision to eliminate tales considered to be too indecent for the English reader. The first two translations, by Gladwin and Demoulin, were published in Calcutta for East India Company employees studying Persian and evidently followed pedagogical purposes. The third translation, by Ross, displayed the first attempts at a philological study on the poet’s biographical account and variations of manuscripts. Eastwick’s version, the fourth, reintroduced the work in a literary style, still different from the one in Persian, but in an adapted form that would agree with English taste.
The translators were aware of the pragmatic needs of the British employees to learn both the Persian language and literary epistolary style of writing, but seemed incapable of transmitting this style in their English renderings; this is reflected in their commentaries about the difficulties of translating Persian metaphors and idioms and on how Persian literary devices lose their charm in English and sound repetitive.
With regard to “style,” what may significantly draw a Persian reader’s attention is that the first three English texts are focused on the transmission of the content, and not on the poetics and aesthetics of Saʿdi’s choice of words. In Persian literature, the Golestān is not a model for simplicity, but for ease of expression in eloquent phrasing (sahl-o momtaneʿ). The Golestān’s dibācheh is an example par excellence of ornate prose (nasr-e masnuʿ), a poetic form of prose which was created in the twelfth century by a monshi of the Ghaznavid court (977–1186), Abu al-Maʿāli Nasr Allāh, in his Persian Kalileh va Demneh, written between 1142 and 1146, and which became very popular for centuries afterwards. The poetic characteristics of this style are the use of symmetry, rhyme, a diverse range of literary devices, Arabic, and sometimes verbose phrases in order to carry across one same meaning through a variety of forms of expression. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, almost all monshis had to learn this technique of writing and to produce similar texts for historiographies and official correspondence. Saʿdi’s Golestān and the Anvār-e Soheyli by Vāʿez Kāshefi (d. 1504) mentioned earlier by Jones, as model texts were the most significant and canonical examples of this style used by Persian monshis.
Saʿdi used comparisons, allusions, and metaphors, with Koranic verses as well as some stanzas of his own to elaborate his text, yet without grandiloquence. In the first paragraph from the Persian dibācheh of the Golestān for instance, the same number of words used in each sentence and the use of “va” between every other short phrase create a symmetrical structure, similar to that of a couplet. The verbs at the end of the sentences—and sometimes every word in the sentence—rhyme with the ones in the same grammatical position in the next sentence. The short sentences (ijāz) that rhyme together are full of imagery, and the verses inserted within the text make it pleasant for the reader to read the same message rephrased in the poems. Because of their rhythm, these verse sections could be memorized easily. As a result, once read aloud, the prose text of the Golestān sounds as harmonious as the poetry with which it is interwoven. The elegant use of language would make the tales ingenuous, and with the creation of “variations in the style of expression,” in contrast to what the British would perceive in English as the rephrasing of the same message, would not be perceived as repetitive by Persian readers. Above all, Saʿdi’s wittiness and sense of humor make these tales more attractive and amusing.
The monshis suggested reading the Golestān to the British because it was an essential model for Persian composition. Besides, its short and varied tales were suitable for educational purposes. For the monshi, the Golestān represented a literary form, whereas for the British translator, the text was treated as part of a language teaching manual and its translation was seen as a phase in language acquisition. At first, the translators did not consider the literary aspect of the text, omitted verses to avoid repetition and paid more attention to the understanding of the moralistic content of the book; thus Saʿdi was portrayed as “the prince of Persian moralists.”Footnote 56 On the other hand, for the Persian reader, the first translations of the Golestān seemed dull and without spirit, and far removed from Saʿdi’s work. It took over fifty years for the English translators to develop an approach to Saʿdi’s style which showed admiration for both the aesthetics of the poet’s literary language and the meaning of the text.
The last translation, by Eastwick, an ornate text of high literary merit, was published in England with a refined presentation and was presented to the Queen of the British Empire. The translator’s approach towards style had grown and his intention did not seem to be merely producing a language handbook for East India Company cadets. We should bear in mind that Persian began to lose its importance as an official language within British institutions from 1835 onwards, when the East India Company decided to replace it with English or local vernacular languages. This policy influenced the teaching of Persian as a useful diplomatic language. Moreover, the British perception of “style” changed through this period for pragmatic reasons: colonial systems that were first attentive to the high standards of writing in correspondence with the Indian political systems and the court began to enforce English for communication. Consequently, the objectives of translation and the approach to the Persian language changed, and more attention was drawn to the appreciation of aesthetics in Persian literature. The East India College in Haileybury closed in 1858, following the Indian Mutiny in 1857 that finally led to the nationalization of the East India Company by the crown and the fundamental changes of its policies. Eastwick, being a Persian scholar there in the 1850s, was certainly aware of this change of policy towards Persian and within the East India Company, and followed a more distinguished purpose for his new rendering than was demanded of colonial administrators: his endeavor was to attain Saʿdi’s elegant style. This unsolved problem no longer regarded the pedagogical attainment of epistolary prose: it was rather a matter of producing a translation of the Golestān of literary value for a different British readership. He sensed that in order for his translation to be successful, it would need to appeal to multiple constituencies and be fit for any type of reading. In other words, he intended to produce literature. Eastwick’s translation of Saʿdi’s Golestān makes clear this change of view about the objectives of translation in the 1850s.
The four English translators knew about each other’s works, criticized each other’s methodologies, and tried to gain credibility for their own work by referring to the Persian monshis whose shadows were omnipresent, from the choice of the text and its introduction to Europeans, to the translation process and even—in the case of Eastwick—in the approval of the English text through comparison to the Persian one. As the monshis were the principal mediators of knowledge, their standard criteria for appreciating literary texts would impact Europeans’ perception of the Indo-Persian textual corpus. In the meantime, though acquiring authentic Indian knowledge from Indian scholars was promoted, cultural differences would create challenges for their collaborations which could sometimes turn into a power struggle, when the pattern of colonial domination was temporarily overturned through the Indian tutor’s position of power with respect to the English student. The English needed to learn about and adopt local administrative culture, but on the other hand they preferred British standards over the Indian ones, and claimed to enrich the local culture through its Anglicization. This paradoxical situation is reflected in the history of translation of the Golestān: the monshis were considered unreliable for translation, but were still referred to as an authentic Persian source, though their names were not mentioned. Likewise, much interest was shown by the British towards the canonical texts of Persian literature and yet the style of Persian literature was judged and devalued according to English standards, which were considered more “accurate” or “better and simpler.”
Conclusion
The “Saʿdi trend” in nineteenth-century Europe was partly indebted to Sir William Jones’ vision for linguistic education and to his fellow promoters of British institutions devoted to the study of Indian and Persian languages and cultures. The Asiatic Society and Fort William in Bengal supported the translations and editions of Saʿdi’s Golestān along with manuscript copies as a common schoolbook throughout the East India Company’s colleges.Footnote 57 The translations were student-oriented and written in plain English. The translators knew each other’s works and tried to outdo each other by gaining greater familiarity with various aspects of the Persian poet’s life and personality. They promoted the image of Saʿdi as a man of learning and wisdom from the East, a dervish (Sufi) free of worldly belongings and full of divine inspiration, and a teacher of moral lessons—an image which did not completely correspond to Saʿdi’s character in Persianate culture. It was on these terms that men of letters such as Emerson discovered and honored Saʿdi, calling him “The Poet,” by which he meant “the perfect man.”Footnote 58
The Golestān’s canonicity among monshis for practicing Persian ornate prose was one of the main reasons why this book became “the” textbook for English officers who were ambitious enough to learn Persian and its complicated epistolary style, even though, as Jones mentioned, they criticized its “lofty figures and flowery descriptions with lessons of morality and tender sentiment.”Footnote 59 Despite Jones’ emphasis on the Golestān as an ideal text for learning an elegant style of Persian writing, his translation and those of his first successors lacked this style. They consciously differentiated between style in Persian and English and found it impossible to genuinely transmit or reproduce the Golestān’s style due to culturally distinct criteria for literary quality. However, by the mid-nineteenth century, their attention had gradually shifted from practical uses of the text to its literary aesthetics. Diverse factors, such as the target audience changing from learners of Persian for the East India Company to a more general English-speaking reading public, as well as the aims of the translation and the translators’ personal literary skills, influenced the British perception of this work throughout this period. Eastwick’s translation was apparently a solution to this challenge since it concurred with English literary criteria; it was appreciated from an aesthetic standpoint and at the same time retained other qualities of the text, notably wit and humor. Thus, the approach towards translation and its objectives changed: English translations of the Golestān went from being aimed at transmitting cultural knowledge and offering language practice to being aimed at transmitting Persian book culture and literary style.
Saʿdi’s popularity in Europe is indebted to the Indo-Persian learned scholars who contributed to the formation of the pedagogical curriculum at the British institutions in India and actively took part in the research, compiling, translation, and construction of British knowledge about “the Orient.” Despite certain misconceptions on the perception of Saʿdi and his works, monshis played a significant role in his introduction to the West; and even though their names are not mentioned on the cover of the translations, they remain the invisible messengers of the poet’s thoughts into English literature.Footnote 60
