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This research paper follows a thread of translation and intertextual dialogue, taking us from the thirteenth-century Persian poet Sa’di to the nineteenth-century French poet Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. I read Desbordes-Valmore’s poem ‘Les roses de Saadi’ (1860) alongside the two passages from S’adi’s Gulistan from which it was inspired, shedding new light on the poem’s metapoetic subtext. By comparing the original Persian text to the two French translations through which Desbordes-Valmore would have had access to it, I demonstrate that Desbordes-Valmore recast in secular terms Sa’di’s discourse on poetic language, emphasizing the continuity, rather than difference, between her concerns and the Persian poet’s. In doing so, Desbordes-Valmore’s process was the very opposite of the ‘orientalization’ of the Orient described by Edward Said in Orientalism.