Thanks, Edmund and Alison, for your very good and related questions. I guess
I will try to answer them both in one message:

Edmund wrote:

>>I'm curious as to what you're translating of Saadi?<<

I have completed a translation of selections from the Gulistan, which comes
chronologically after the Bustan, and is in some ways the more popular book
(though the Bustan, I think, is recognized as the greater of the two works),
if only because, as a mixed genre work--poetry and prose--it is more
accessible. At least that seems to be the received wisdom. My own sense is
that the interplay between the prose and the poetry in the Gulistan makes
that work more subtle in many ways than the Bustan, the translation of which
I am working on now. My translation of the Gulistan is based on Edward
Rehatsek's 1880s translation, which is today generally recognized as the
most accurate English-language version that we have. (This version is
sometimes attributed to Richard Burton, of Kama Sutra fame, and it was
indeed originally published by Burton's Kama Shastra society because Chapter
5 of the Gulistan is actually quite sexual and deeply homoerotic. The
history of the translation of this text is quite interesting on these
grounds--some people heterosexualized all the content; others translated the
really sexy bits only in Latin; but that is a whole other topic that I have
not yet fully researched.) My translation of the Bustan will be based on
Wickens' 1970s translation, which is also the one currently recognized as
the most accurate.

One of the things that's interesting in looking through translations of
these two texts is that they tend to fall into two categories, those that
are based on scholarship and/or attempt to be literary--the ones I am using,
A. J. Arberry's and others--and those that were done with the intention of
revealing the Sufi-mystical nature of the text. The latter ones almost
always end up as lineated prose. A guy named John D. Yohanan wrote a book
about the history of Persian poetry in English, which I have only dipped
into and so I don't want to say too much about the "very long history...of
correspondence between the forms of Arabic and Persian and English poetry
from the pre-Islamic Arabic Ode...onwards" that Edmund points out, except to
acknowledge that it's there and to suggest that the word "correspondence"
is, as I understand these relationships, a highly problematic one,
especially since it is almost impossible to translate most Persian
prosody/poetic forms into English with any measure of success.

Edmund wrote:

>>Can you say more about how else Pope correlates and how he enables thought
on tone and form in trans Saadi? It seems an interesting link! The
counterparts to Saadi's two great gardens in European lit would seem to be
more in the tradition of common-place books and epistolary works, dialogues
and literary instruction (Castiglione...) and in fable collections: The
sustained vigour of Dryden/Pope/Johnson with their Classical models shares
an ethical basis with Saadi, but in tone and cast of rhythm and imagery my
instinct would personally lead me to Andrew Marvell.<<

And Alison wrote:

>>but I have a bit of difficulty associating Sufi mystic poetry with the
poetry of Alexander Pope! Could you explain further those connections?<<

My response to these two questions is sort of a jumble since I am puzzling
this out as I work. I should say that this project quite literally fell into
my lap and that I had no idea who Saadi was before I started working on it,
so I am learning about classical Persian literature while I translate. But
here is an attempt at least to list out some of the various parts of the
jumble:

1. What sent me to Pope was reading the introduction to A. J. Arberry's
translation of the first two chapters of the Gulistan, where he points
out--and I am paraphrasing from memory--that Saadi wrote an ethically
concerned verse that we have not seen in English since Dryden/Pope/Johnson.

2. While I understand why Edmund would see the comparison to epistolary
works, fable collections and such, the thing that, in the Persian canon,
distinguishes Saadi's work from other works of literary instruction, etc. is
that Saadi very consciously pays attention to what we might call the
creative-writing component of the work. He wants these books to be read as
literature, not simply as books of moral instruction. I will confess to not
knowing enough about Marvell to know whether his rhythm and imagery is
closer to Saadi, but my understanding of Saadi's purpose is that it was much
closer to Dryden/Pope/Johnson and that has a lot to do also with why I am
reading Pope.

3. Regarding Alison's question about Pope and Sufi-mystical poetry: Saadi's
work is profoundly different from Rumi's or Hafez's. In fact, there is a
story that Rumi and Saadi once met and that Rumi refused to speak with Saadi
because he came from an alternative Sufi tradition, one that emphasized
intellectualism and a groundedness in day-to-day living that was anathema to
the more charismatic approach taken by Rumi. I am reading Rumi mostly to
fill in gaps in my own knowledge about Persian literature, and I am
interested in the different approaches that have been taken to translating
classical Persian poetry in the 20th century, since it is a poetry so very
different from our own in so many ways--and this despite the fact that
Persian is an Indo-European language.

And I guess now I need to stop--though I could keep going--because my wife
is here and we have stuff we need to attend to. You can see some samples of
my Gulistan translations on my website, www.richardjnewman.com (just go to
the Gulistan page) and on http://cipherjournal.com/html/gulistan.html. The
book itself will be out in a couple of weeks. I will, of course, announce
it.

Cheers!


Rich Newman