Morals Pointed and Tales Adorned / THE BUSTAN OF SA’DI

گلستان سعدی شیرازی

Sa’di s Bustan in undoubtedly the best known major poem of a moralistic character – using this term in a thoroughly genera connotation – in the whole range of Persian literature. In several ways, indeed, it is sui generis.
Its 8000’ odd’ lines’ (just over 4100couplets in the present translation) were reputedly completed, in the poet’s mature years, in the winter of 655/1257. In the following January, the Islamic world was forced across a decisive psychological watershed, when the Mongol capture of Baghdad extinguished the caliphate which for 500 years past had there served as at least a symbolic focus of self awareness for the majority of Muslims. While most of the accompanying political and economic setbacks were not without precedent, and had in this case long been predictable, the effective obliteration of that long line of spiritual-temporal heads proved a shock from which the world of Islam has still not entirely recovered. Yet only a few months after this event, and at a geographical remove of no more than 500 miles from the scene, Sa’di produced, allegedly as a dish of appetizing left –over’s from the Bustan, the more popular prose and-verse compilation knows as the Gulistan.
In content and attitude, the two works are clearly related, whether or not that relationship really was fissiparous: both inculcate, by a judicious mixture of precept and illustration, a code of “lifemanship” that is at once frankly realistic and (by what is perhaps only a seeming paradox) mystical and high minded. But in the Gulistan the stories themselves, couched in a prose style where art most thoroughly conceals art, are quite recognizably the poet’s primary concern as well as the reader’s and the work as a whole is, in consequence, more superficial and elaborately “devised”. The Bustan, on the other hand, is solider, plainer, more carefully worked out and thought through; of the 160 “tales” so designated in my translation, only one-tenth could be classed as really substantial, with perhaps a further tenth of fair length, the other four-fifths ranging from two to six lines or so, and merging into dense tracts of rapture, reflection, and exhortation. The latter passages are often splendidly, or colorfully, or effectively worded, but such a discrepancy in the two “mixtures” has no doubt been a major factor in determining the relative popularity of the two works in both East and West; for while neither is easy to read with full appreciation, the prose is not essentially simpler than verse, the very construction. If the Gulistan can be seen as a light, sophisticated work of entertainment and comment, the ostensibly more “artificial” Bustan is in reality more earnest and practical.
Something should assuredly be made of the fact that while the former is a ROSE-GARDEN, the title of the latter is perhaps most validly rendered as KITCHEN-GARDEN. (Those whose concern was more with etymology than actual usage have tended to prefer interpretations like GARDEN of FRAGRANCE or PLEASURE GARDEN. A common title in early times was the bare SAADI-NAMA. The Sa’di Book, but this was later dropped in favor of the present less ambiguous one.) 

On Love: The beloved, on fire, chided by the lovers

I’ve heard that to a minstrel’s melody
One with a pari’s form did once begin to dance;
At all the hearts in turmoil round about her,
A candle’s fire caught at her skirt;
Distraught of mind she grew, as suffering pain,
One of her lovers said to her: Why worry?
Your skirt, dear friend, -no more-the fire is burning:
With me, it’s utterly burned up my lifetime’s harvest!
If you’re a true companion, prate not of yourself,
For where there’s “companion” and where there’s “self,” there’s also polytheism!

Majnun importuned in his grief

To Majnun said a person: “O you of goodly footprint!
What is with you amiss that no more to the tribe you come?
Remains in your head no frenzy for Laila?
Has your fancy altered, and remains no inclination?
When the poor wretch heard this, pitifully he wept:
O master mine! Hold your hand from off my skirt!
A heart is mine already that is sore and lacerated:
Do not you too pour salt upon my wound!
Remoteness is no proof of self-restraint,
For many a one remote is so by sheer necessity!
Whereat the other answered: “Loyal are you, of happy disposition:
Tell me any message you may have for Laila!”
Said he: “Use not my name when in the presence of my friend,
For where she is, my name brings only trouble!”

On Acceptance: One man’s loss…

I’ve heard a dinar from a penniless man’s grasp
Did fall, and much the poor wretch sought it,
But turned away at length the head of desperation;
Another, all unlooked-for, found it.
For ill-luck and good-luck both, the pen
Did move while we were still within the womb;
Daily bread is not consumed by force of fist:
Indeed, the forceful-fisted may more tightly rationed be;
Many a resourceful lad has died in hard estate,
While one resource less carried off security’s own ball!
A father’s punishment must be endured
An old man belaboured his son with a stick,
Who said: “My father beat me not in innocence!
“Gainst men’s injustice I may cry to you,
But what recourse when you yourself treat me unjustly?”
Cry to the Just One, man possessed of sense;
But, at the Just One’s weighty hand, no cry bring forth!

On Contentment: A mystic refuses to buy on credit

One who had sugar-cane upon a tray
Hied to left and right in search of customers;
To a man of heart said he, in a corner of the village:
Take it and pay when you are able!
That wise one, beautifully compounded, gave
An answer fit for engrossing upon the eyes:
“Maybe you’ll not be able to wait for me,
But I can do without the sugar-cane!”
Sugar within its cane cannot be sweetness
When bitter demands come after it.

A cat learns contentment

A cat there was in an old crone’s house,
One knowing days upturned, and ill-conditioned;
Once to the prince’s guest-hall it betook itself,
And there the ruler’s henchmen shot their arrows at it;
Off, then, it went with blood from bone dripping,
And said as it ran, in terror of its life:
“If from the marksman’s power I escape,
It’s me for mice and the old woman’s hovel!”
Honey, my soul’s not worth the bee-sting’s wound,
Better contentment with the syrup that you have.
The Lord by that servant will not be gratified
Who with the Lord’s apportioning is not satisfied.

Concerning the World of Edification: Sa’di and a jealous fellow-Lecturer

I was once paid a stipend in the Nizamiya,
For night and day I lectured and reviewed;
One day to the professor I spoke: “O prudent sir!
Such and such a colleague’s jealous of me:
When in my discourse I do justice to the inner meaning.
His innards foul are all disturbed!”
That captain of polite learning heard these words,
Then flared up sharply: “How remarkable!
You could not approve jealousy from a friend,
But who gave you to understand that calumny was good?
Though he mean-spiritedly takes the road to Hell,
You’ll get there by this other read!”-

Persian Heritage Series / Translated by G.M. Wickens
E.J. Brill, Leiden 1974
EDITOR: Ehsan Yar Shater, Columbia University