Persian Munshi, Persian Jones: English Translations of Sa'di's Gulistan

From the seventeenth century, Muslih al-Din Sa’di Shirāzi (d. 1291), a key figure in Persian classic literature, became the center of Europeans’ attention: his name appeared in travelogues and periodicals and selections of his tales were published in miscellaneous Latin, German, French, and English works. To follow Sa’di’s impact over English literature, one should search for the beginning of the “Sa’di trend” and the reasons that led to the acceleration of the translation process of his works into English language in the nineteenth century. This article aims to scrutinize the role of the British educational institutions in Colonial India in the introduction of Sa’di and his Gulistān to the English readership, and in parallel, it discovers the role of the Indo-Persian native scholars (munshis) who were involved in the preparation of translations. We will see how the the British perception of Sa’di’s literature developed in the first half of the 19thcentury and how their approach towards the translation of the “text” and its “style” evolved in the complete English renderings of the Gulistān.