In recent decades, the richness of medieval Persian literature has become common knowledge across the globe thanks to popular translations of the poetry of Jalal al-Din Rumi, who has even become the best-selling poet in North America. During the last few years, the poetry of Hafiz has started to attract a similar level of interest, albeit through “channelled” translations by Daniel Ladinsky. These phenomenal rises in popularity would seem to have a precedent in the nineteenth-century fascination with the translated quatrains of the mathematician and minor poet Omar Khayyam. In that case, one can identify a “pizza effect”, in that Khayyam (as he is commonly known in predominantly Shii Iran) started to be taken seriously at home as one of the master poets of the past after he had won extraordinary popularity in Victorian England. However, a closer precedent can be found in another Persian poet's work, albeit a prose work, namely the Gulistan of Saʿdi. The popularity of Saʿdi's Gulistan as a collection of moral stories has been much more international, with translations into more than twenty languages since the seventeenth century, including several into English and French. How appropriate that its most famous lines should have been engraved at the entrance of the United Nations.

The present work is a bilingual edition prepared by Professor Wheeler Thackston, recently retired professor of the practice of Persian language at Harvard University, who is known to students of Persian across the United States and the United Kingdom mainly for his grammars of Persian and Classical Arabic. The edition of the Persian text, which is presented facing his English translation, is not a new critical edition, but one based on four existing printed editions, with variants indicated as endnotes. Thackston justifies this on the grounds that the discrepancies too rarely affect the meaning to warrant a new critical edition, which sounds perfectly reasonable in the case of the Gulistan. The Persian typescript is clear and attractive, and is lineated to correspond as precisely to the translated text facing it as is practically possible.

Thackston's translation fits in with his no-nonsense attitude towards variants in the editions of the text, and also towards the hagiographies of Saʿdi, in that it is literal, economic and without embellishment. One could characterize his translation as being the ideal result which students trained under his teaching programme should produce under examination. Needless to say, such a text in English fails completely to render the stylistic richness of the prose and verse of Saʿdi, but Thackston does not pretend to address this issue. Even if it is somewhat flat and uninspired, what his translation offers the reader is a clear, fluent and accurate English text, facing the Persian original.

Intended as a classroom edition, it even includes a 3,600-word glossary divided into Persian–English and Arabic–English sections, and also provides minimal background notes to individuals mentioned in the text. It is difficult to see how it could be appealing outside of the classroom, especially since the Persian text would be meaningless for general readers, and the resultant price prohibitive. Having said that, it is one of few English translations of the Gulistan to have been produced in the last century, and virtually the only complete rendering into modern English in spite of the many modern abridged translations that are widely available.

My one complaint about using this edition in the classroom is that it provides the “answers” on the page facing the “questions”, in that Thackston's literal and plain translations are printed directly opposite the source text. It would have been more practical to have printed them as separate sections of the same volume. In its current form it will serve best the needs of those who can already read the Gulistan quite fluently, but wish to perfect their reading skills through independent study with the aid of a model translation to refer to. When it comes to Saʿdi's Gulistan, there are many Persian speakers who will benefit in this way, and in particular take advantage of the Arabic–English glossary. There are few typographic errors in this publication, although the blurb on the handsome dust jacket is unfortunately not flawless.

Thackston's edition and translation is a significant contribution to the resources which enable students of Persian to appreciate its rich literary heritage directly, something which was encouraged by President Barack Obama in his video message to the Iranian people on the occasion of the turn of 1388 in the Persian calendar. Interest in Saʿdi's work may well have increased in the English-speaking world after he concluded that conciliatory video message by quoting the same two couplets from the Gulistan which are engraved at the entrance of the United Nations: