About the word:
In Persian, Saghi is someone who pours wine and hands it. In Iran, when friends gather to drink wine together, they sit around and one of them (with a rather higher social status among them) pours wine into a glass and first drinks it himself, then pours another one (into the same glass) and hands it to the next person. Then the third person drinks and so on … until all persons in the circle have their turns, so at the end of the first round, all have taken a gulp of wine. Then, the Saghi starts over distributing wine until they are all done. Sometimes Saghi is not one of the friends in the circle. In these cases, it may be a male or female servant who serves others.
This tradition has been in place for more than one thousand years and there are a lot of poems praising saghi (for his/her beauty or kindness or ….).
I have looked up this word in google translator and it suggests butler that does not seem to be correct. Other equivalents that I have come up with are bartender, barman, and barmaid that do not seem to be correct.
Have you any idea what word can we use when translating texts (especially poems) containing this word? Thank you very much.
Best Answer
If you want to know what word to use when translating poems, I think it would be best to look at what human translators have used in the past, rather than turning to Google Translate. Here is a poem translation "Saghi-Nameh" where the word "bearer" is used (the term "wine bearer" might be used to clarify the meaning).
Two other terms, "wine server" and "cup bearer," are listed in this Wikipedia article: Persian Wine.
To me, "wine bearer" and "cup bearer" sound old-fashioned, but the custom itself would probably seem old-fashioned in English-speaking countries. The term "wine server" sounds less old-fashioned.