Saadi’s Gulistan and Bostan in Punjabi prose
Shafqat Tavnir Mirza

SAADI NAMA…..prose translation of Saadi’s Bostan and Gulistan by Muhammad Shareef Sabir; pp 484; Price Rs500 (hb); Publishers, Punjab Institute of Language, Art and Culture, Punjabi Complex, 1.Gadhafi Stadium, Ferozepur Road, Lahore.
Sheikh Musharrafuddin Muslehuddin Saadi (1184-1291 AD) was a junior contemporary of father of Punjabi poetry, Baba Farid Shakarganj. He was born in Shiraz where his scholar father was in the service of ruler Atabek Saad bin Zangi, hence he took Saadi as his penname.
His books in Persian were the part of the curriculum taught in the subcontinent during the Sultanate and the Mughal period and even in the Sikh period of Punjab, Kashmir and Pakhtunkhwa. Hence his popular books Gulistan and Bostan have been translated in many languages of the region, including Punjabi prose and poetry, but Shareef does not like to refer names of translators and rejects all those without any solid reason.
This egoistic attitude denies readers of this book, the information about the early translators. It was the duty of publishers to get an exhaustive chapter on the life and work of Saadi and the translations done in Punjabi or its dialects.
It was the moral duty of translators and publishers not to reject the required information as casually as has been done. Right Mr Sabir has done Data Ganj Bukhsh’s Kashful Mahjoob and poet Sufi Afzal’s Persian work in Punjabi but that is not a license to reject the work done in this particular field before he took up the job.
According to Dr Shahbaz Malik’s Punjabi Kitabiyat Vol 1, Saadi’s Gulistan had been translated into Punjabi by Hakeem Fazal Elahi, Daaem Iqbal Daaem and Syed Ghulam Mustafa Moshahi.
His Pandnama and Kareema had also been translated into Punjabi by Maulvi Muhammad Ibrahim and Bhai Kishan Singh Arif in the late 19th century. Asar Ansari has recently done the translation of Saadi’s work in Punjabi. Muhammad Bashir Zaami also translated 100 stories of Saadi in Seraiki.
Khwaja Jamil Ahmad in Hundred Great Muslims divided Saadi’s life in three periods, the first lasting up to 1226 was the period of study spent mostly at Baghdad.
Even during this period he made several trips. He visited Balkh, Ghazna, Yemen, Punjab, Syria, Iraq, Baalbak, North Africa and Arabia and Asiatic Turkey. His second period was mostly spent in travels in the Muslim world, gaining rich experience which he incorporated in his two immortal books, Gulistan and Bostan.
Jamil quotes Prof Browne: “In his own writings, he appears now painfully stumbling after the pilgrim caravan through the burning deserts of Arabia, now, bandying jests with a fine technical flavour of grammatical terminology with school boys at Kashghar, now a prisoner in the hands of Franks, condemned to hard labour in the company of Jews in the Syrian town of Tripoli, now engaged in investigating the mechanism of a wonder-working Hindoo idol in the temple of Somnath”.
On his return to his native town Shiraz in 1256AD he settled down to literary work. This marks the third period of his life mainly devoted to literary creation. In 1257, he wrote his famous Bostan in verse and a year later in 1258 he completed his well-known Gulistan in prose, a collection of anecdotes, drawn from rich stories of observation and experience, based on ethical reflections and maxims of worldly wisdom.
His Gulistan and Bostan are undoubtedly the most popular ethical works in the world. These have been widely translated into Western as well as Eastern languages, including English, French, German, Russian, Latin, Polish, Turkish, Arabic, Urdu and Hindi. Jamil says: Saadi is a great champion of downtrodden, destitutes, orphans, widows and all those who should be helped on humanitarian grounds.
The translation of Sabir is quite well but he and his publisher should have given the story of the life of the poet which is much more inspiring for Punjabi readers.
The most unfortunate fact is that the lettering (imla) is very faulty and contradictory, the weakest point of Punjabi language which has earned many problems. For instance word toon (you) has been written as toonh, word jihdi as jaihdi, aik instead of ik or hik. This Imla or lettering issue and the purity of language should be learnt from Najm Hosain Sayed, a close associate of Sabir.
From this point of view, the book should have been edited by an expert linguist. If Sabir can use two or three types of future tenses in his poetry why not in prose work like this translation. Anyhow the major responsibility lies with the PILAC managers who should be particular about language, lettering and grammatical aspects.
***** DUKHAN DI DOPAHR by Rafiq Kashmiri; pp 160; Price Rs150 (hb); Publishers Shahi Publications, 69 Riazul Muslameen, Deepalpur Chowk, Okara.
This is the fifth collection of Punjabi poetry by Rafiq who is now author of 11 books of which six are in Urdu. Poetry and music are his first love. This time he has expressed his deep concern about the game of the Americans and the Taliban which has created many serious problems for Pakistanis, particularly, for those who had witnessed the bloodshed and the unprecedented migration of 1947 when Rafiq was 13 years old.
This is what he has said in plain Punjabi prose and concludes that America is a blind superpower which has ultimately to be blown up but before that it will destroy many poor and weak countries. Unlimited power has only one logical end and USA will have to face it. But presently he wishes that a Mansoor should appear on the scene:
But he knows well there is no Mansoor anywhere in this country where are courtiers of the Khalifa of Baghdad.
Curtsey:DAWN.COM — PUBLISHED FEB 23, 2011