Sa'di of Shiraz

Sa'di (Muslih al-Din Sa'di) was born in Shiraz, in southern Persia, around 1210, and was educated at the Nizamiyya college in Baghdad. By his own account he spent some thirty years travelling, through Syria, Anatolia, Egypt, Arabia and beyond, working as a preacher and wayfarer before he went back to Shiraz, where he lived on in retirement and died in 1291. Anecdotes of his captivity, his poverty and his encounters on the road are scattered through his writings, though the traditional life is hard to separate from the stories he tells.

He wrote the Bustan (The Orchard, or Garden of Fruit) in 1257 and the Gulistan (The Rose Garden) in 1258, both dedicated to the ruler of Fars, the atabak Abu Bakr ibn Sa'd. The Bustan is a verse masnavi in ten chapters of moral stories; the Gulistan is chiefly prose with verses. Neither of the English books here is the Gulistan. The poems are the twenty-four pieces of Arthur N. Wollaston's Sadi's Scroll of Wisdom (1906), in rhymed verse; the work is A. Hart Edwards's Bustan (1911), which renders the original in English prose.