Saʿdī

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SAʿDĪ

SAʿDĪ (ah 597?–690/1200?–1291 ce), pen name of Abū ʿAbd Allāh Musharrif (al-Dīn) ibn Muṣliḥ al-Dīn Saʿdī-yi Shīrāzī, Islamic Persian belletrist, panegyrist, and popularizer of mystically colored poetry. His exact name (other than the universally used nom de plume ) and his precise birth and death dates have been much disputed, and he has often been credited with longevity of well over a century. He was born and died in the south Iranian capital of Shiraz, but allegedly spent some half of his life elsewhere, partly perhaps to escape the Mongol invasions and the constant petty warfare within Iran itself. His wanderings fall into three categories: study, most importantly at Baghdad; pilgrimages to the holy cities of Islam (Mecca and Medina); and general drifting, as he claims, all over the Islamic world and beyond.

At one point, so he relates, he was a prisoner of war of the Crusaders and was set to hard labor until ransomed into an unfortunate marriage. Some time around the second and major Mongol invasion of the Middle East in the late 1250s, he seems finally to have retired to his native city—Shiraz was somewhat off the beaten track for the Mongols, as it proved—and established himself as a man of letters and a sort of court-holding sage. The detailed facts of Saʿdī's life are almost as much disputed as his full name and dates, for most of the information derives from, or depends heavily on, his own avowedly "poeticized" writings. However, along with his acknowledged stature as a writer, certain features of his career are hardly open to doubt: his hard-won erudition, his urbane and even cynical world experience, and his familiarity with all aspects of the dervish way of life, both practical and theoretical.

Saʿdī's writings, most of which are poetry, fall into various categories and are often published in one large volume as Kullīyāt (Collected works). Once again, there is much controversy as to the period of his life to which some items belong, but the two longest and most significant can be fairly specifically dated. These are the Būstān (Herb garden), completed at some time in late autumn of 1257, and the Gulistān (Rose garden), published in the spring of 1258. In the few months between these two dates there occurred one of the most traumatic events, at least from the psychoreligious point of view, in the history of Islamic society: the sacking of the capital city of Baghdad and the extinction of the venerable Abbasid caliphate. Yet if the onrushing storm is nowhere presaged in the former work, its aftermath—at only some eight hundred kilometers' distance—is equally passed over in silence in the latter. There could be several plausible reasons to account for this idyllic detachment on the part of one of Iran's great commentators on life: one is that (other arguments notwithstanding) Saʿdī might have been a Shīʿī, and no sorrier than Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī to see the symbol of perceived Sunnī usurpation so drastically defaced. Certainly, despite one or two brief and formal elegies elsewhere on the passing of the old order, he would soon come to offer panegyrics to the new rulers.

The Būstān is a work of some 4,100 lengthy couplets, divided into ten unequal sections, the rich content of which is only approximately indicated by such general titles as "On Humility," "On Contentment," and so forth. Though clearly grounded in a rather humane, mystically tinged Islamic, and even pre-Islamic, tradition, it is ethical, moralistic, and edifying rather than religious in any strict sense. An element of entertainment, rarely missing from such works in Persian at any time, is provided by frequent variation of matter, style, and pace, and by the inclusion of some 160 illustrative stories (some quite short and not designated as such). At the same time, the poem is not merely exhortatory, but reflective and in places almost ecstatic. Yet if it achieves a beneficial moral effect, it does so primarily through its incomparable style and narrative power: at virtually all points throughout its lengthy sweep, it is fluent, elegant, graphic, colorful, witty, paradoxical, and above all epigrammatic.

The Gulistān, Saʿdī would have us believe, is a hasty compound of material left over from the Būstān. Superficially, it is certainly quite similar in subject matter, but it is much more obviously a work of art and light entertainment. Arranged in eight main sections, again of considerable vagueness as to central theme, it is primarily a collection of stories, told in exemplary (often rhyming) Persian prose with verse embellishments in both Persian and Arabic. The general tone is much less lofty than that of the Būstān ; indeed, it is frequently quite worldly, even cynical and flippant. Despite this, it has always been the more popular of the two in both East and West, though manuscripts and editions of both have been reproduced beyond counting, so quintessentially Persian are they held to be.

Apart from a few prose essays, the rest of Saʿdī's writings consists largely of monorhyming poems of two kinds: the long qaṣīdah (some forty double lines or more) and the shorter, more lyrical ghazal (of a dozen double lines or so). These poems are usually classified in various arbitrary ways having little or nothing to do with their essential character. Quite a few are circumstantial and panegyric, and some (not included in most editions) are downright obscene. Excepting a few in Arabic, nearly all of them are in Saʿdī's native Persian, and the great majority anticipate Ḥāfiẓ (d. 1389?) in ambiguously using the language of earthly love for mystical statement or vice versa. Saʿdī was a complex character, clearly vain of his own literary skill and disingenuous about his loyalties, and his allegedly religious utterances, however sublime, can rarely be taken at simple face value. Indeed, he often warns his readers against taking any of his words too literally. His supreme achievement was to speak with the voice of his age and his culture, and his writings are religious only in the sense that the age was (and the culture still is) deeply permeated by the matter of religion.

Bibliography

The literature on Saʿdī is enormous, but most of it (apart from articles in the standard histories of Persian literature and similar reference works) is still not available in Western languages, and nearly all of it is long out of print. The standard monograph, which reviews virtually everything worthwhile prior to its own date, is Henri Massé's Essai sur le poète Saadi (Paris, 1919).

Editions of Saʿdī's works in Persian are countless; practically none of them are in any sense critical. As to translations, few of the individual poems have been satisfactorily rendered into any Western languages. There are, however, reliable and recent English renderings of the two major works: the Būstān, which I have translated with an introduction and notes as Morals Pointed and Tales Adorned (Toronto, 1974), and The Gulistān or Rose Garden of Saʿdī, translated by Edward Rehatsek (1888), which I have revised with an introduction (New York, 1965). Both of these contain further bibliographical information.