Sheikh Saadi of Shiraz
I recently completed Dan Blank’s Build Your Author Platform online course (which I recommend, by the way, to anyone who wants to understand better how to treat her or his writing career as a business), and one of the things I learned was the importance of being on Twitter. I’ve had a Twitter account for quite some time now (you can follow me @richardjnewman) but I had never really understood how to use it in a meaningful way. In any event, one day, while I was playing around, trying to figure out whom to follow, what threads to pay attention to, what to retweet, what to tweet and so on, I had the brainstorm to look for hashtags for the names of the classical Persian poets I have translated, and I found one for Saadi of Shiraz (#Saadi). I read through his tweets for a few minutes–and was quite impressed by the number of people who seemed to be retweeting them–when something about the language started to sound familiar. So I opened up the PDF of my translation of Saadi’s Gulistan, entered a phrase from one of the tweets and, sure enough, it turns out that, whoever Saadi of Shiraz is, he or she has been tweeting my translations! Here are a couple:
Speak kindly to a man whose speech is kind. Don’t start a fight with a man who comes in peace. #Saadi
— Saadi Shirazi (@ShaykhSaadi) October 19, 2012
Neither the beauty of your speech, nor the praise of an ignorant man, nor even your own convictions are reasons to be proud. #Saadi — Saadi Shirazi (@ShaykhSaadi) October 23, 2012
Show mercy to a wicked man and you deprive good men of justice. Fail to punish a tyrant and you have punished instead those he oppressed. — Saadi Shirazi (@ShaykhSaadi) October 14, 2012
Reading these brief excerpts outside the context of the book in which I published them made them new again, and I was reminded of just how much wisdom there is in Saadi’s work. More than that, though, when I first discovered that this man or woman has been tweeting my translations and that they have been making their way around the world–because Saadi of Shiraz’ followers are, as far as I can tell, flung pretty far and wide geographically–well, I was so moved, so humbled, really, that, at first, I could not say a word about it. Now it just makes me happy.
When a beggar asks for money, give it, or be prepared to lose it to a thief. #Saadi
— Saadi Shirazi (@ShaykhSaadi) September 11, 2012
Water and mirror both shine brightly. Still, you must be able to tell bright from bright. #Saadi
— Saadi Shirazi (@ShaykhSaadi) September 8, 2012
That’s so neat! What a fun discovery.