For all its punishing workload, translation can be a thankless task, and translators are often the unsung heroes. This is especially true when it comes to breathing fresh air into a work of medieval literature wherein the translator perseveres with a bygone zeitgeist that challenges his artistic and literary prowess alike. To say that writing and translation are inextricably linked is to state the obvious. Sometimes, however, the translator needs to reexamine the history through the lens of literature and vice versa. The most ingenious translators aren’t the ones who faithfully rewrite the original work in the target language, but those who creatively reimagine it as well. In doing so, they might have to gingerly zigzag their way through a stilted language drenched in obsolete words that nevertheless communicate timeless ideas. In one such case, Mahmoud Rezvani, an Iranian scholar, teacher, and literary translator, has been able to do exactly that—bringing Sa’di’s Golestan, a work of classic Persian literature, to life in all its austere grandeur by preserving the rhyme in the poems and the musicality in the rhymed prose in ways never done before.
Abu-Muhammad Muslih al-Din bin Abdalah Shirazi, better known as Sa’di, was a thirteenth century Persian poet whose plangent poetry and compassion for humanity once received effusive encomium from the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Even the oft-quoted opening lines of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—I celebrate myself, and sing myself / And what I assume you shall assume / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you—have arguably been inspired by Sa’di’s timeless bani adam poem.
Rezvani is sixty-six now, with a salt-and-pepper handlebar mustache and a gregarious affect. He first began teaching in 1971 at the age of seventeen, and has since taught through such turbulent times as the Islamic Revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, and now the COVID-19 pandemic. “I still remember the very first air strike in Tehran during the war,” he says, “and I even remember what exactly I was teaching that day.” Still, Rezvani has never relinquished his sanguine attitude over the years. In the classroom, he is well known for his exuberance, oratorical bravura, and improvisational teaching style. Beyond that, his Renaissance-man bona fides—he has had serious grounding in math, Persian calligraphy, awaz (traditional Persian singing), literature, and martial arts—are also worth noting, most of which have served him well in his preparation for translating Sa’di.
Starting in 2008, the translation took Rezvani ten good years to finish. In March 2016, in an interview with Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation, he cited “love” as the most important driving force behind his labor. That same month, he gave a first public reading of his translation at the University of California, Berkeley. Among the attendees were former US poet-laureate Robert Hass and his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, both of whom applauded the decade-long effort. Since then, Rezvani’s translation has been endorsed by UNESCO and published—quite apropos to Sa’di’s hometown—by the University of Shiraz.
Our conversation took place on two separate occasions, and with diametrically opposite vibes. For the first part of the interview, I met Rezvani at his office after his last online class of the day which had ended around 10 pm. He was characteristically lively and rather voluble in his responses. For the second part, however, a somber mood was on full display during our discussion, following the death of Grand Maestro Mohammad-Reza Shajarian—Iran’s most internationally recognized awaz songster—who happened to be Rezvani’s longtime and beloved friend.
Siavash Saadlou (SS): How did the decision to translate Golestan come about? Why did you begin in 2008 and not sooner or later?
Mahmoud Rezvani (MR): I considered translating Golestan several times, but I was too afraid to give it a shot. Part of this had to do with my perfectionist nature, and part of it had to do with the enormity of the task. But an interesting incident gave me the belief that I could translate Golestan after all. About twenty years ago, Mohammad Hoghooghi, the late poet and literary critic, had a niece living in the United States who was getting married. He had written a letter in Persian for the wedding, and he needed someone to translate it into English, since his niece understood very little Persian. The letter was filled with purple prose, and Mr. Hoghooghi couldn’t find the right translator for the job. One day, he came to my language institute and asked if I could translate the letter. When I did translate the letter, it became somewhat of a sensation in small literary circles in the US at the time. Flash forward six months, Mr. Hoghooghi invited me to a get-together where many renowned Iranian translators were present. The moment I entered, he introduced me to everyone as “the one who translated the impossible,” and this served as a huge confidence-builder for me. That was the first time I seriously considered translating Golestan.
You asked me why I didn’t put off the translation until later, and I can only think of Sa’di’s own words from one of his poems, about how none of us can be sure if we would still be here in this world when the next spring comes around. That’s why I told myself, there’s no time like the present, and began to translate the book. When I first started working on Golestan, I never thought it would take me a decade to finish it. I still teach full-time, so I can’t solely focus on translation. When I was working on Golestan, I mostly translated on Thursday afternoons sitting in my office. Sometimes I used to translate as many as ten or twenty lines at a time, and other times I struggled with one particular page, even a single word, for days.
SS: Why is there such a startling lack of literary translators coming from Iran, especially when it comes to translating from Persian to English? It’s not merely a matter of linguistic ability, is it?
MR: I think there is this common belief in Iran that only doctors and engineers are worthy of being called “successful.” Many parents actually believe that pursuing the arts is for lazy people. I still remember teaching at Pasteur Institute years ago, where all my students were medical doctors, and one of them actually hated the medical practice. In fact, I would always find him curled up with a Time or Newsweek magazine sitting in the library. He told me he’d always wanted to study literature, but his parents wouldn’t let him do that. Sadly, as long as there is this belief that human sciences aren’t as valuable as other pursuits, there will continue to be a lack of translators.
SS: We can’t really criticize the Western world, then, for what could be called cultural imperialism, when people like Coleman Barks, for example, translate Molana—better known as Rumi in the West—without knowing any Persian, and in doing so they tend to alter or distort the original passage however they please.
MR: Yes, exactly. All we can do is do a better job translating our poets instead of picking on others for what a poor job they might have done in the past. As they say, it’s easy to be brave from a safe distance. If you believe something has to be done to remedy the situation, go ahead and do it.
SS: How would you sum up Sa’di’s worldview?
MR: Sa’di’s stories and poems exhibit a perennial conflict between egoism and altruism. He divides people into two major groups: hermits and scholars, and he considers the former to be selfish. He believes an individual’s worth should be measured by what they’re contributing to the world around them. In other words, not only does he think poorly of people who try to harm others, he also regards people who are impassive towards societal woes as egoists. His famous bani adam poem, which is often mistakenly read as “human beings are limbs/members to one another,” sums up his worldview. Actually, the poem derives from a Hadith attributed to Prophet Muhammad: Alnas-o-kal-jasad-ol-vahed—humanity is one same body.
SS: What makes Sa’di difficult to translate?
MR: One of the reasons why translating Golestan is difficult is because of the era in which it was written. Many of the concepts found in Golestan have simply become obsolete, and many of the words Sa’di uses may not make sense to the younger generation. Think of the Persian term gaazor, for instance, which refers to the person who washed the clothes by whipping them against a piece of stone while sitting by a body of water. Moreover, how you read the passage is important. Depending on the stress in a verse or a sentence, the whole meaning changes. For example, the Persian shayad can be read as “perhaps,” but it is also used to tell someone that a misfortune serves them right. Other difficulties I can think of include the abundance of allusions (especially to the Qur’an), the nuances of rhymed prose, and last but not least, the musicality.
SS: Why is musicality so important in classical Persian literature?
MR: In ancient Iran, people considered anything that was musical to be poetry, and that’s why rhymesters, whose sole task was to compose rhymes, were so revered back then. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, this tradition has lived on to this day. Aside from the younger generation, most people still refuse to consider anything without a rhyme to be a poem.
SS: Let’s talk about some of the places where previous translations fall short. What are some of the especially egregious errors that might have misled the reader?
MR: There are plenty of examples. In the book’s prologue, for instance, there’s a section where God is talking to His servants, saying that He is ashamed “for” their suffering. Basically, He is expressing sorrow for the humankind’s pain, but in one previous translation, the translator has translated this sentence as “I am ashamed of my servants.” One preposition has completely overturned the meaning of the whole sentence. Even later in the passage Sa’di provides further context, but the translation is still irremediably wrong. Other examples I can think of include homographs and homophones. There is a poem where Sa’di is referring to dibay-e-mo‘lam (“variegated brocade”) which the translator has translated as “teacher’s brocade” because mo‘lam and moalem are written the same in Persian.
Another factor is that a lot of what’s written in Golestan is archaic Persian in itself, so the translator will have to first convert that into less archaic Persian to be able to translate the passage. In fact, even with a near-perfect grasp of modern Persian, you wouldn’t be able to translate Golestan. There is also an element of what the French call faux ami or false friends—also known as false cognates—in which words in different languages may look alike, but in fact have different meanings. As a result, you can get confused about word use, and the concept of faux ami is quite present in Golestan.
SS: Emerson once hailed Hafiz as “the prince of Persian poets.” Yet, in his famous 1842 eponymous panegyric on Sa’di, he writes, Though there come a million / Wise Sa’di dwells alone. What attracts you specifically to Sa’di? Why do you think Sa’di is not as popular as Hafiz in Iran?
MR: I think the main difference between the two is that Hafiz’s poems mostly revolve around love and romance—don’t get me wrong, he wrote convincing and masterful poems; but I think that where Hafiz is oftentimes cryptic, ambiguous, or just impenetrable, Sa’di is very perspicuous. His aphorisms are applicable in daily life. So much of the Persian we’re speaking today is actually Sa’di’s language. He was years ahead of his time and broke away from pompous writing. So many of the phrases we use in today’s Persian are because of Sa’di. For example, the phrase “the house is rundown from the foundation” comes from one of his stories, and we still use it today in everyday Persian. I think we owe the Persian we speak today to two poets: Sa’di and Ferdowsi.
I think one of the reasons why Hafiz is extremely popular is because he wrote a lot of love poems, and he wrote them in the form of ghazal—a short poem consisting of rhyming couplets. What’s interesting is that there are countless instances where Hafiz has clearly been inspired by Sa’di and has even attempted to copy him.
SS: You originally studied statistics in college. How do you think your background in mathematics helped you with the translation of Golestan?
MR: I think having a mathematical mind helps you better understand some of the structures in Golestan—the symmetries, the parallelisms, the proportions. Those structures exist for the sake of rhetorical effect, and being able to see them opens up your eyes to their beauty and allows you to do a better job translating them. I think Sa’di was an architect of words, and having a well-organized mathematical mind enables you to appreciate the various structures he uses. You can recognize, for instance, his symmetry of crescendos and decrescendos. There is this seamless marriage of syntax and semantics in his work that’s inimitable. Sometimes you can even see certain collocations as vertical or horizontal.
SS: You could hardly fight back tears at the unveiling ceremony of your book at the University of Shiraz. What was going through your mind at that moment?
MR: Everything flashed before my eyes: my childhood; my dad, who taught me the poetry of Sa’di when I was six; the people who had encouraged me to consider this mammoth undertaking; the whole journey. It was overwhelming. The first thought that occurred to me was how glad and grateful I felt to have lived long enough to get the translation done the way I had always imagined. I think what triggered the tears was when I addressed Sa’di in my heart, telling him to kindly accept my token of recognition, telling him that I did my utmost. After the unveiling ceremony, I went to visit Sa’di’s mausoleum and that’s when the real crying began.
SS: One last question: Do you consider yourself a teacher or a translator?
MR: The two aren’t mutually exclusive, but if I were to choose one, I must say that I’m a teacher through and through. Teaching has also always been the greatest joy of my life, my raison d’être and my joie de vivre so to speak. And as Chomsky once famously said, teachers are born, not made. I’ve always loved to teach ever since I was very young. And if I were born once again, I’m sure I’d do exactly what I’ve been doing in this life.
Mahmoud Rezvani is a literary translator, scholar, and the founder of Iran’s Association of Translators. He is the translator of, most recently, Golestan—The Flower Garden (University of Shiraz Press, 2018). Among other subjects, he currently teaches translation and classic Persian literature at the Simultaneous Interpretation Preparatory Courses Institute in Iran, where he is also the dean. Rezvani is a regular visiting lecturer at UNESCO’s Persian Literature Distinguished Speaker Series.
Siavash Saadlou is a writer and translator. His fiction has appeared in Margins, his criticism in Asymptote, and his poetry in KAIROS, Saint Katherine Review, CIRQUE, and elsewhere. His translations of contemporary Persian poetry have been published in Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, and Pilgrimage, among many other journals. Saadlou lives in Tehran, teaching creative writing and translation workshops.
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