Gertrude Bell by Georgina Howell Page B

published to as large an acclaim as a book of poetry can elicit. Edward G. Browne, the greatest authority on Persian literature of his day, said of her translations: “though rather free, they are in my opinion by far the most artistic, and, so far as the spirit of Hafiz is concerned, the most faithful renderings of his poetry”; and, with the single exception of Edward FitzGerald’s paraphrase of the quatrains of Omar Khayyam, “probably the finest and most truly poetical renderings of any Persian poet ever produced in the English language.”
    The intentional vagueness of Hafiz’s poetry, the play on words and the musicality of the Persian language in its form, metre, and rhyme, all make it almost impossible to translate. Her solution was to write free poetrywhich could be said to take off from the originals, capturing their essence and function—then soaring up and away. Denison Ross demonstrated the problem, and her solution, in his preface, offering a literal translation of the beginning of one of the poems for comparison with Gertrude’s rendering.
    The first four lines of his translation read:
    I will not hold back from seeking till my desire is realized,
Either my soul will reach the beloved, or my soul will leave its body.
I cannot always be taking new friends like the faithless ones,
I am at her threshold till my soul leaves 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.
Others may find another love as fair;
Upon her threshold I have laid my head . . .
    Particularly poignant are her last lines of the poem, which depart rather noticeably from the original:
    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
.
    She was fortunate in her teachers of Persian and Arabic: as well as Denison Ross, there was the eminent linguist S. Arthur Strong, whom she refers to as “my Pundit.” “My Pundit kept congratulating me on my proficiency . . . I think his other pupils must be awful duffers! . . . He brought me back my poems [her translations of Hafiz] yesterday—he is really pleased with them.”
    All her life Gertrude read and reread both the classical and the modern poets, collecting every edition as it was published, and including poetryin her travelling library. To the surprise and disappointment of Florence and Hugh, after all the praise that was heaped on her as the translator of Hafiz, she appeared to consider her own gift of verse as a secondary pursuit and abandoned it altogether. “That gift has always seemed to me to underlie all she has written,” said Florence. “The spirit of poetry coloured all her prose descriptions, all the pictures that she herself saw and succeeded in making others see.” This spirit, thought her stepmother, was a strange and interesting ingredient in a character “capable on occasion of a very definite hardness, and of a deliberate disregard of sentiment: and also in a mental equipment which included great practical ability and a statesmanlike grasp of public affairs.”
    It is perhaps unreasonable to have expected Gertrude to produce more books of poetry as well as her stream of wonderful letters, diaries, and books. On this unique occasion the yearning for the unattainable beloved, whether metaphysical or human, struck that chord in her aching soul capable of producing a superlative vein of poetry. It seems that the pure creative power ignited in her was a response to something already out there, but felt within her on a different level. All aspects of her life work were, in a sense, passionate responses: her travel books, her exploration, her archaeology; her learning, especially of languages; her mountaineering; her work for the