dots-menu
×
Home  »  library  »  prose  »  Sa’dī the Captive Gets a Wife

C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

Sa’dī the Captive Gets a Wife

By Sa’dī (c. 1213–1291)

From the ‘Rose-Garden’: Translation of Edward Backhouse Eastwick

HAVING become weary of the society of my friends at Damascus, I set out for the wilderness of Jerusalem, and associated with the brutes, until I was made prisoner by the Franks, who set me to work along with Jews at digging in the fosse of Tripolis; till one of the principal men of Aleppo, between whom and myself a former intimacy had subsisted, passed that way and recognized me, and said, “What state is this? and how are you living?” I replied:—

  • STANZA
  • “From men to mountain and to wild I fled,
  • Myself to heavenly converse to betake;
  • Conjecture now my state, that in a shed
  • Of savages I must my dwelling make.”
  • COUPLET
  • Better to live in chains with those we love,
  • Than with the strange ’mid flow’rets gay to move.

  • He took compassion on my state, and with ten dīnārs redeemed me from the bondage of the Franks, and took me along with him to Aleppo. He had a daughter, whom he united to me in the marriage knot, with a portion of a hundred dīnārs. As time went on, the girl turned out to be of a bad temper, quarrelsome and unruly. She began to give a loose to her tongue, and to disturb my happiness, as they have said:—

  • DISTICHS
  • In a good man’s house an evil wife
  • Is his hell above in this present life.
  • From a vixen wife protect us well;
  • Save us, O God! from the pains of hell.

  • At length she gave vent to reproaches, and said, “Art thou not he whom my father purchased from the Franks’ prison for ten dīnārs?” I replied, “Yes! he redeemed me with ten dīnārs, and sold me into thy hands for a hundred.”

  • DISTICHS
  • I’ve heard that once a man of high degree
  • From a wolf’s teeth and claws a lamb set free.
  • That night its throat he severed with a knife;
  • When thus complained the lamb’s departing life:—
  • “Thou from the wolf didst save me then; but now,
  • Too plainly I perceive the wolf art thou.”