Anvar-e Sohayli is the late fifteenth-century Persian Timurid rewriting of the Kalila and Dimna fables by Va'ez Kashefi. It is one of the most memorable versions of this collection of fables that are meant to function as a grim and very effective mirror for princes. The Timurid author engaged with an older, twelfth-century, Persian translation of the fables, by the Ghaznavid writer Nasrollah Monshi, that presents itself as a translation of the famous Arabic Abbasid mother version written by Ibn al-Moqaffa’. The Monshi version can be described as a bilingual prosimetrum: its prose text contains numerous inclusions of Arabic and Persian verses. This prosimetric form is kept by Kashefi, but though he often reproduces verbatim the Monshi’s prose passages, he drastically scraps his predecessor’s verses which he replaces with his own “persianised” inclusions. Kashefi’s Anvar-e Sohayli was at the origin of several rewritings and translations. I will briefly present and discuss the following avatars of Kashefi’s text: the 1588 ‘Eyar-e Danesh is an abbreviated version written in Persian by Abu’l-Fazl for Akbar; the 1644 Le Livre des Lumieres ou la conduite des Roys compose par le Sage Pilpay is a translation in French by Gilbert Gaulmin (with the help of David Sahid of Ispahan) presented at the court of the young Louis XIV; the 1678 second volume of Fables by Jean de la Fontaine contains rewritings of several of the stories published in French by Gaulmin; the 1724 Contes et Fables Indiennes by Antoine Galland (completed by Cardonne) is a translation of Chelebi’s Ottoman Turkish Homayun Name proposed to the court of Louis XV. The questions I will ask are: What do we know of the literary ambiance for which each of these five works were composed? Who were the patrons and what sort of “payback” would they have expected? How are these two elements reflected in the style and contents of the proposed rewritings/translations? What does this tell us about the audience targeted by each of these authors?