A Woman in Arabia (6 page)

In 1892, when Gertrude was twenty-four, she was invited to stay with her aunt Mary and uncle Sir Frank Lascelles, ambassador to Persia (now Iran) in Tehran. For six months in advance, she learned Persian, then continued to study the language in Tehran. She was much encouraged in this by an agreeable and scholarly legation secretary, Henry Cadogan, a grandson of the 3rd Earl Cadogan, who found her a teacher and gave her books of Persian poetry to read. Exploring and riding out together on picnics and expeditions, Henry would produce a book from his pocket and read Sufi poetry aloud to her, describing the yearning for the Beloved that filled the vacuum between the profane and the divine. It was not long before she fell in love for the first time and wrote to her father to ask if she and Henry might become engaged. After a short delay, Hugh Bell's reply arrived, and it was unequivocal: no engagement was possible, and she must leave and come home at once. Gertrude, of course, was an heiress, and her father had heard that not only was Henry penniless, but he was also a gambler. Not a year after a brokenhearted Gertrude left Persia, Henry fell into an icy river while fishing and died of pneumonia. Partly as a tribute to his memory, and a lingering suspicion that it might have been suicide, Gertrude wrote and, in 1897, published
Poems from the Divan of Hafiz,
an English rendering of forty-three poems of the fourteenth-century Sufi mystic Shemsuddin Mahommad, better known by his pen name Hafiz. These Persian
ghazals
, or odes, range in length from ten to sixteen couplets, all on one rhyme and each
containing a new idea, and always introducing the poet's name in the last couplet.

In London, she continued her Persian lessons with Sir Edward Denison Ross, director of the School of Oriental and African Studies. The foremost linguist of his day, he could read forty-nine languages and speak thirty but had the modesty to write of Gertrude at the end of the 1890s that he had had “the healthy experience of realising in the presence of such a brilliant scholar my own limitations.” Gertrude's
Poems of the Divan of Hafiz
was published together with her biography of the poet set in the context of his contemporary history—a tour de force in its own right, there being no written history of Islamic Persia at the time. It received as large an acclaim as a book of poetry can elicit. The greatest authority on Persian literature of her day, Edward G. Browne, said that with the single exception of Edward FitzGerald's paraphrase of the quatrains of Omar Khayyam, her translations were “probably the finest and most truly poetical renderings of any Persian poet ever produced in the English language.”

She beautifully and rather freely rendered the verses into English poetry imbuing them with great sadness, coloring Hafiz' work with the melancholy of her own poignant loss, and occasionally departing rather noticeably from the original. In the second poem below—“the nightingale with drops of his heart's blood . . . ”—Hafiz was writing of the death of his son; but Gertrude was undoubtedly thinking of Henry.

Denison Ross in his preface demonstrated the exact material she had to work on by giving a literal translation of the original of one of Gertrude's renderings.

Dast az talab nadaram ta kam-i dil bar ayad

Ya tan rasad bijanan, ya jan zi tan bar ayad

literally means,

I will not hold back from seeking till my desire is realised,

Either my soul will reach the beloved, or my soul will leave its body.

Gertrude wrote,

I cease not from desire till my desire

Is satisfied; or let my mouth attain

My love's red mouth, or let my soul expire,

Sighed from those lips that sought her lips in vain.

Piecing together the scattered facts of Hafiz' life, she sketched the elusive history of Sufism and referred to the “interminable, the hopeless mysticism, the playing with words that say one thing and mean something totally different, the vagueness of a philosophy that dare not speak out, which repels the European just as much as it attracts the Oriental mind.” For such a pragmatic personality to illuminate the highest aim of the Sufi—the annihilation of the actual—was a considerable feat, although in the translator's preface she could not resist writing, “I have a shrewd suspicion that the Cup-bearer [teacher] brought him a wine other than that of divine knowledge, and that his mistress is considerably more than an allegorical figure.” In the same vein, she fearlessly guides the average European reader: “The tavern . . . is the place of instruction or worship, of which the tavern-keeper is the teacher or priest, and the wine the spirit of divine knowledge . . . the idol is God; beauty is the divine perfection; shining locks the expansion of his glory; down on the cheek denotes the cloud of spirits that encircles his throne; and a black mole is the point of indivisible unity.” As if aware that leading Sufis would disdain these mundane translations, she concluded, “I am very conscious that my appreciation of the poet is that of the Western . . . what his compatriots make of his teaching it is perhaps impossible to understand.”

In 1903, Denison Ross was amused to receive a telegram from Gertrude in Rangoon, on the second of her around-the-world tours, which asked: “Please send first hemistich of verse ending
Wa khayru jalisin fi zaman kitabu
.” He was able to
telegraph immediately in reply: “
zahru sabihin A'azz makanin fiddunya
” [sic]:

The finest place in the world is the back of a swift horse,

And the best of good companions is a book.

FROM A VERSE OF THE POET AL-MUTANABBI

Gertrude remained a lover of poetry all her life but never wrote another poem. As Florence wrote, this passion for reading poetry was “a strangely interesting ingredient in a character capable on occasion of very definite hardness, and of a deliberate disregard of sentiment.”

On all her desert expeditions, Gertrude always carried a pocket set of Shakespeare in her saddlebag. On one occasion on her final expedition, when it was raining too heavily to go on, she wrote in her diary, “I sat in my tent and read Hamlet from beginning to end and as I read, the world swung back into focus. Princes and powers of Arabia stepped down into their true place and there rose up above them the human soul conscious and answerable to itself.”

Four Poems by Hafiz, Rendered in English by Gertrude Bell

I cease not from desire till my desire

Is satisfied; or let my mouth attain

My love's red mouth, or let my soul expire,

Sighed from those lips that sought her lips in vain.

Others may find another love as fair;

Upon her threshold I have laid my head,

The dust shall cover me, still lying there,

When from my body life and love have fled.

My soul is on my lips ready to fly,

But grief beats in my heart and will not cease,

Because not once, not once before I die,

Will her sweet lips give all my longing peace.

My breath is narrowed down to one long sigh

For a red mouth that burns my thoughts like fire;

When will that mouth draw near and make reply

To one whose life is straitened with desire?

When I am dead, open my grave and see

The cloud of smoke that rises round thy feet:

In my dead heart the fire still burns for thee;

Yes, the smoke rises from my winding-sheet!

Ah, come, Beloved! for the meadows wait

Thy coming, and the thorn bears flowers instead

Of thorns, the cypress fruit, and desolate

Bare winter from before thy steps has fled.

Hoping within some garden ground to find

A red rose soft and sweet as thy soft cheek,

Through every meadow blows the western wind,

Through every garden he is fain to seek.

Reveal thy face! that the whole world may be

Bewildered by thy radiant loveliness;

The cry of man and woman comes to thee,

Open thy lips and comfort their distress!

Each curling lock of thy luxuriant hair

Breaks into barbed hooks to catch my heart,

My broken heart is wounded everywhere

With countless wounds from which the red drops start.

Yet when sad lovers meet and tell their sighs,

Not without praise shall Hafiz' name be said,

Not without tears, in those pale companies

Where joy has been forgot and hope has fled.

The nightingale with drops of his heart's blood

Had nourished the red rose, then came a wind,

And catching at the boughs in envious mood,

A hundred thorns about his heart entwined.

Like to the parrot crunching sugar, good

Seemed the world to me who could not stay

The wind of Death that swept my hopes away.

Light of mine eyes and harvest of my heart,

And mine at least in changeless memory!

Ah, when he found it easy to depart,

He left the harder pilgrimage to me!

Oh Camel-driver, though the cordage start,

For God's sake help me lift my fallen load,

And Pity be my comrade of the road!

My face is seamed with dust, mine eyes are wet.

Of dust and tears the turquoise firmament

Kneadeth the bricks for joy's abode; and yet . . .

Alas, and weeping yet I make lament!

Because the moon her jealous glances set

Upon the bow-bent eyebrows of my moon,

He sought a lodging in the grave—too soon!

I had not castled, and the time is gone.

What shall I play? Upon the chequered floor

Of Night and Day, Death won the game—forlorn

And careless now, Hafiz can lose no more.

Thus said the Poet: “When Death comes to you,

All ye whose life-sand through the hour-glass slips,

He lays two fingers on your ears, and two

Upon your eyes he lays, one on your lips,

Whispering: Silence.” Although deaf thine ear,

Thine eye, my Hafiz, suffer Time's eclipse,

The songs thou sangest still all men may hear.

Songs of dead laughter, songs of love once hot,

Songs of a cup once flushed rose-red with wine,

Songs of a rose whose beauty is forgot,

A nightingale that piped hushed lays divine:

And still a graver music runs beneath

The tender love notes of those songs of thine,

Oh, Seeker of the keys of Life and Death!

Return! that to a heart wounded full sore

Valiance and strength may enter in; return!

And Life shall pause at the deserted door,

The cold dead body breathe again and burn.

Oh come! and touch mine eyes, of thy sweet grace,

For I am blind to all but to thy face.

Open the gates and bid me see once more!

Like to a cruel Ethiopian band,

Sorrow despoiled the kingdom of my heart—

Return! glad Lord of Rome, and free the land;

Before thine arms the foe shall break and part.

See now, I hold a mirror to mine eyes,

And nought but thy reflection therein lies;