Sa'di's Love in Britain; Interview with Homayoun Katouzian

"Sa'di in Love" is a new translation of selected ghazals of Sa'di into English by Homayoun Katouzian, a professor of Persian literature and Iranian history at Oxford University, illustrated with miniatures by Mahbubeh Qods, a professor at Columbia University. This collection is published by I.B. Tauris in Britain. Previously, in addition to several articles about Sa'di, Katouzian has published the following books: "Sa'di, Poet of Love and Life" (Markaz Publishing, 2006) and "Selected Works of Sa'di" (Markaz Publishing). I had a conversation with Homayoun Katouzian about the book "Sa'di in Love." Katouzian: I have published four books about Sa'di. One is the English book you mentioned. Another is a Persian book that is a collection of 20 articles I published in the journal of Iranian Studies in Washington. The other is a selection of Sa'di's works, including excerpts from Golestan, ghazals, Bustan, and qasidas. The last one is "Sa'di in Love," which we translated from the Persian title "عاشقی‌های سعدی." In all these writings, I emphasized that Sa'di's ghazals, his love poetry, are largely unknown. Not only in the West, where Golestan and Bustan have been translated into Dutch, German, and French since the 17th century, but even in Iran, Sa'di is known for Golestan and Bustan, and although his ghazals are among the highest in Persian poetry, they have not received much attention. Except occasionally in traditional singing where Mr. Shajarian and others have taken a ghazal and sung it. In research and criticism, there has been little written about Sa'di's ghazals, whether in Persian or abroad. I have said this everywhere, and that is why in the collection of articles I wrote in Persian, four articles are solely about Sa'di's ghazals. This time, I wanted to introduce Sa'di's love poetry on an international level, so I selected them and wrote a relatively detailed introduction about ghazal, which is included at the beginning of the book. You say that you decided to present them internationally because even in Persian, they have not received much attention. However, compared to other poets like Ferdowsi, Khayyam, Hafez, and Rumi, who are literary peaks of Iran, you have always had a special emotional connection with Sa'di's ghazals, just as you have had a special intellectual connection with his prose. Why? I became familiar with Sa'di's works from childhood, and I was very attracted to him. Of course, I became acquainted with the works of other masters like Hafez, Ferdowsi, and Khayyam, and to a lesser extent with Rumi. But I developed a special artistic and literary affinity for Sa'di that has always stayed with me, and I continued my studies on Sa'di's works until about twenty to twenty-five years ago when I started writing the articles I mentioned. As I said from the beginning, I emphasized that Sa'di's ghazals have not received the attention they deserve. This time, I wanted this work to be done internationally and in two languages. Of course, the book I wrote in English was also international, but one chapter of that book was about Sa'di's ghazals, while this last book is entirely about Sa'di's ghazals. What was your criterion for selecting the ghazals in this book? The ghazals of Shams' Divan by Rumi are filled with ecstatic mysticism, while Sa'di's ethical and mystical ghazals are very composed and calm, lacking that excitement. However, his excitement is more present in the ghazals he wrote about human love. I divided Sa'di's ghazals into four main categories: one group about love, another group praising the beloved, a group about the night of union, and a group about the night of separation. There is also a fifth group, which consists of Sa'di's ethical and mystical ghazals, which are much fewer, about 10% of Sa'di's ghazals. I categorized these five groups, selecting a few examples from each for translation, placing the Persian text alongside them. Overall, how many did you select? 78. How many ghazals does Sa'di have that 10% of them are ethical and mystical? Over seven hundred, and perhaps less than ten percent are such ghazals. I estimate, but it is certainly not more than that. Those ghazals are ethical and mystical, meaning they do not resemble the ghazals of Shams' Divan by Rumi. The ghazals of Shams' Divan are filled with ecstatic mysticism, while Sa'di's ethical and mystical ghazals are very composed and calm, lacking that excitement. However, his excitement is more in the ghazals he wrote about human love. Your translations of Sa'di's ghazals in this new book are accompanied by images, like Hafez's Divan that people have in their homes, and many of them are illustrated. Why was the image important to you? It took me two or three years to finish translating these ghazals. At that time, I had no idea about how to publish it, except that I was doing this work to be published. But when it was done, while thinking about the type of publication, I concluded that since it is the first time Sa'di's ghazals are being published internationally, it should also have a certain elegance. It should be a beautiful and pleasant volume, not an ordinary print. So, I spoke with Dr. Mahbubeh Qods, an Iranian artist who teaches at Columbia University, and she created these very beautiful miniatures that we included in the book. You mentioned that translations of Sa'di into various languages date back to the 17th century. However, foreign writers and literature enthusiasts, especially in English-speaking countries, have focused more on Khayyam, and recently on Rumi and Hafez and Ferdowsi. Why has Sa'di been less introduced in the West? Considering that Sa'di traveled more than other poets to the farthest cities and lands of his time, and according to scholars and historians like yourself, he was even more famous among the public and the elite before his death than others. Voltaire once said that if Sa'di were from Iran, it shows that Iranians are very civilized people. One of the top leaders of the French Revolution, Lazar Carnot, who was both the organizer of the defense of the French Revolution against foreign invasions and a notable mathematician, named his son Sa'di, and Sa'di Carnot became a very prominent physicist in the first half of the 18th century. After him, his nephew was named Sa'di in his honor, who became President of France. Khayyam was introduced and popularized by Edward FitzGerald in the second half of the 19th century, particularly in America, where many people even named their sons Omar after Khayyam. Hafez was introduced by Goethe in the 19th century in his famous work "West-Eastern Divan." Rumi has recently gained popularity in the last twenty to thirty years, especially in America. This popularity is much less valuable than the others because anyone who did not know Persian or barely knew it presented their own translations of Rumi. You can see on these websites what things and statements they make that do not resemble Rumi at all. Ferdowsi has always been mentioned, but more recently, especially with the translation by Richard Davis, a prominent English Iranologist who teaches in America and is also a poet. His complete translation of the Shahnameh caused it to be widely recognized. Of course, nationalistic sentiments and so on that have become fashionable among Iranians inside and outside the country in the last twenty to thirty years have also played a role in this matter. In any case, this is the history of fame and familiarity with these poets. Sa'di was introduced in the West from the 17th century, first in Dutch. Then I believe it was translated into German and then into French around the same time, and later in the 18th century into English. Sa'di was very fashionable in the 18th century, during the Enlightenment. His works and thoughts and his approach to life, beyond his poetic and literary art, resonated with Enlightenment thinkers and encyclopedists and people like Voltaire... Voltaire once said that if Sa'di were from Iran, it shows that Iranians are very civilized people. One of the top leaders of the French Revolution, Lazar Carnot, who was the organizer of the defense of the French Revolution against foreign invasions and a notable mathematician, named his son Sa'di, and Sa'di Carnot became a very prominent physicist in the first half of the 18th century. After him, his nephew was named Sa'di in his honor, who became President of France. Therefore, Sa'di received a lot of attention. In the 20th century, overall, there was less attention to Sa'di, partly because for the past fifty to sixty years, especially Iranians themselves have not paid attention to Sa'di. Before this interview, I looked at the critiques of two students of literature and comparative literature in Iran regarding two translations that two English-speaking scholars had done of Sa'di's verses. These two concluded that their unfamiliarity with the vocabulary and terms and perhaps the devices and beauties and especially the references in the Persian language to the level of the language they grew up in caused them to produce translations that were both structurally and content-wise far from the original verses. Is translating Sa'di more difficult than translating the ghazals and verses of other poets like Khayyam, Ferdowsi, Rumi, and Hafez? Or are they all equally difficult? Firstly, translating poetry is very challenging from any language to any other language. Now, leaving aside the free poetry of the last thirty or forty years that is so simple that it can be easily translated into other languages. But I mean poetry as we know it; translating it from one language to another has always been very difficult, precisely because of the characteristics that poetry has. The special beauties, metaphors, allegories, and allusions. Translating these into another language is not easy. Also, meter and rhyme. This general principle must be kept in mind. We have two or actually three types of translation. One type is what is called "rendering" in English, which means a kind of conveying the point into another language, like FitzGerald's translation of Khayyam. That translation is not the translation of Khayyam's quatrain. From Khayyam's quatrain, he took an effect and created his own poem that he wanted to be equivalent to it, and it has an effect from Khayyam's quatrain. This is a kind of transferring rather than translating. I do not know a Persian word for rendering in this case. One type is more or less literal translation. The criticism that those two Iranian critics made was undoubtedly because of this. They criticized verses that were translated literally, and their artistic value is very low. Another type is when the translator tries to convey the poet's poem and at the same time ensure that the poem does not seem strange in the target language. This is very challenging, and I tried to do this. Of course, I also did something else: I placed the translation of each verse opposite its Persian counterpart. This is usually not the case. But I placed an English verse opposite each Sa'di verse. Not that I made two English verses from one verse or one English verse from two or three verses and so on...