~ finding the right voice ~
Many of the stories in On Love and Youth, the fifth chapter of Sa'di's Gulistan, involve love affairs between men and youths: masters with slaves, princes with youthful subjects, teachers with schoolboys, and other variations. In most cases, the context of the relationship suggests that the youth is an adolescent or young man. For quite some time, readers in the English-speaking world had no idea Sa'di's Gulistan contained such stories, for translators either changed references to boys to refer to girls instead or, just as frequently, deleted the stories entirely. These three translations do not make that mistake.