The Picture Gallery (Nigāristān)

A Persian Moral Miscellany

Muʿīn al-Dīn Muʿīnī Juvainī
Translated by Edward Rehatsek
Edited by Gregory Maxwell Bruce

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The first English translation of Nigāristān: a major work of Persian literature

Contains an extensive introduction and detailed glossary of names
Includes notes and indices to facilitate comparative study

The Picture Gallery (1888) by Edward Rehatsek (1819–1891) is an English translation of the Persian moral miscellany Nigāristān (1334–5) by Muʿīnī Juvainī, which was modelled on the Gulistān (1258) of Saʿdī. Originally completed for the Kama Shastra Society, Rehatsek’s translation has remained unpublished until now. This edition, edited by Gregory Maxwell Bruce, has been compiled from Rehatsek’s original manuscript and contains extensive information about the translator, translation, text, and original author. It also contains a scholarly glossary of names and information aimed at facilitating comparison between Rehatsek’s translation and Muʿīnī’s Persian original.

Contents

Editor’s Acknowledgements
Editor’s Note on Rehatsek’s Transliterations
Editor’s Note on the Introduction, Annotations, and Appendices
Editor’s Introduction

The Negaristân (Picture Gallery)
Translator’s Preface

I. On Generous Behavior
II. On Ascetism and Piety
III. On Laudable Conviviality
IV. On Love and Amorousness
V. On Preaching and Advice
VI. On Virtue and Mercy
VII. Various Admonitions

Appendix 1: Preface by Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot to the Unpublished New Oriental Translation Fund Edition
Appendix 2: Editor’s Glossary of Names and Terms
Editor’s Index

Reviews

The Picture Gallery contains one of the richest collections of teaching stories from medieval Persia, offering readers insights into its ethical values, social dynamics, and political and spiritual ideals.
– Paul Losensky, Indiana University Bloomington

About the Author

Not much is known of the life of Muʿīnī, and the few items that have come down to us are almost all traceable to anecdotes in Nigāristān itself. Although we do not know when he was born, it is clear from Nigāristān that he lived in the first half of the fourteenth century and spent most of his life in or near Juvain in Khurasan, which was then in the eastern part of the Mongol Empire. Concerning his family, Muʿīnī describes his father, Ibn Muʿīn, as a man of literary achievement, wisdom and a Sufi teacher surrounded by a circle of disciples. From Nigāristān, we learn that Muʿīnī’s grandfather, Muʿīnī, was likewise a Sufi teacher and preacher.

Edward Rehatsek (1814–1891) was born in Hungary and educated there as an engineer, but spent most of his adult life in India, where he travelled as an engineer but eventually reinvented himself as an Orientalist. Over the past century and a half, he has been one of the most widely read Victorian-era translators of Persian literature into English. In the same year that Rehatsek completed The Picture Gallery (1888), he shipped his manuscript from his home in Bombay to Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot in England to include in his and Richard Francis Burton’s Kama Shastra Society series. By that time, Rehatsek had already produced two translations of Persian works in the same genre for the series, both of which were published: Jāmī’s Bahāristān as Abode of Spring (1886) and Saʿdī’s Gulistān as Rose-Garden (1887). The Picture Gallery thus represents the mature work of an important translator who had spent several years immersed in this important genre of Persian wisdom literature.

Gregory Maxwell Bruce is Assistant Professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Picture Gallery (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) which is the first and only English translation of Nigāristān by Muʿīnī Juvainī and is compiled from Edward Rehatsek's (1819–1891) original manuscript, Nigāristān: A Facsimile Edition (Mazda Publishers, 2023), Urdu Vocabulary (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), and Turkey, Egypt, and Syria: A Travelogue (Syracuse University Press, 2020). His shorter writings about the history of Persian and Persianate intellectual history and literature in South Asia can be found, inter alia, in Encyclopaedia Iranica, the Encyclopaedia of Islam, Iranian Studies, and SUFI.N.