“My First Night in the Desert,” May 16, 1900
My soldiers are delighted that I can talk Arabic; they say it’s so dull when they can’t talk to the “gentry.” They talk Kurdish together, being of Kurdish parentage, but born in Damascus. Their Arabic is very good. Mine is really getting quite presentable. I think I talk Arabic as well as I talk German (which isn’t saying much perhaps!), but I don’t understand so well. It’s so confoundedly—in the Bible sense!—rich in words.
On Gertrude’s second around-the-world journey, she was accompanied by her half-brother, Hugo.
India, in the Train from Alwar to Delhi, January 18, 1903
My thrice blessed Hindustani, though it doesn’t reach to any flowers of speech, carries us through our travels admirably and here we were able to stop where no one has a word of English, without any inconvenience.
Burma, on the Irrawaddy River, March 2, 1903
We came to a very small steam boat. . . . A steep and slippery plank led out to the boat. I took my courage in both hands, crept along it, lifted the awning, and received a broadside of the hottest, oiliest, most machinery laden air, resonant with the snores of sleepers. I lit a match and found that I was on a tiny deck covered with the sheeted dead, who, however, presently sat up on their elbows and blinked at me. I announced firmly in Urdu that I would not move until I was shown somewhere to sleep. After much grumbling . . . one arose, and lit a lantern; together we sidled down the plank and he took us back to one of the mysterious hulks by the river bank. It was inhabited by an old Hindu and a bicycle and many cockroaches.
Tokyo, May 24, 1903
In one of the temples, a wonderful place all gold lacquer and carving set in a little peaceful garden, a priest came up to me and asked if I were an American. I said no, I was English. . . . I replied in Japanese, in which tongue the conversation was being conducted. . . .
During the years in Mesopotamia she came to speak many Arabic dialects so well that she once disguised herself and was able to tease King Faisal by convincing him that she was a talkative camel driver.
Baghdad, November 29, 1920
I love walking with the beaters (at a shoot) and hearing what they say to each other in the broadest Iraq dialect, which I’m proud to understand.
Baghdad, June 23, 1921
. . . I have been elected President of the Bagdad Public Library. . .*
Notice Distributed by Gertrude to English Publishers, Asking if They Would Care to Donate Books to the Salam Library, 1921
NOTICE TO ALL AUTHORS, PUBLISHERS AND BOOKSELLERS
The Salam Library, Bagdad, intends to issue a periodical publication—in Arabic and English—the object of which is to review books published in Oriental languages, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Hebrew, Syriac, Hindustani, etc.; and also books published in European languages, English, French and German, etc.
This publication will deal only with books presented to the library with a request from the publisher or author asking for a review or notice of the book.
It will also give an account of such manuscripts as may be found in the library or are to be found in local bookshops. Thus the Salam Library’s periodical publication will be the best means for introducing European books to Orientals and Oriental books to Europeans and will serve as a means to facilitate the sale of books.
The Committee of the Salam Library is composed of Arab and British members who will undertake the publication of the periodical.
(Signed) GERTRUDE BELL
President, Salam Library
BAGDAD
THE POET
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;
The glass speaks truth to them that understand.
Night is with child, hast thou not heard men say?
“Night is with child! what will she bring to birth?”
I sit and ask the stars when thou’rt away.
Oh come! and when the nightingale of mirth
Pipes in the Spring-awakened garden ground,
In Hafiz’ heart shall ring a sweeter sound,
Diviner nightingales attune their lay.
THE “PERSON”
The moral and intellectual debate of the age was female suffrage, and from the moment of being allowed to join the adults for meals, Gertrude heard the issue being discussed passionately from all points of view. Hugh and Florence were opposed to it for cogent reasons, but some of their friends were adamant in its support. All the B
ells agreed with John Stuart Mill, the greatest proponent of women’s emancipation of his time, that it was vital for a woman to be a “Person”: it became a family joke that the women seldom felt themselves to be quite enough of a Person.
It has gone down in history that Gertrude was an antifeminist. In 2004, London’s National Portrait Gallery mounted an exhibition of pioneering women travelers called “Off the Beaten Track.” Gertrude’s corner was accompanied by a four-line caption—all that was devoted to her—stating “Despite her own achievements she actively opposed British women being given the right to vote.” Technically correct, the statement is a crude assessment of her ultimate intentions and one that takes no account of the complex politics of the times, or her position as a daughter of the Industrial Revolution. This oversimplification is often leveled against her and has been partially responsible for the way in which her achievements have been undervalued.
While the Reform Bill of 1832 and its successors had increased voters from 500,000 to 5 million by 1884, the vote was still limited to men of property. Only one quarter of the men in Britain had the vote. While the franchise was denied to so many men, Parliament could not have contemplated giving the vote to women. In discussions about giving the vote only to women of property, Parliament came up against an insuperable difficulty: the property laws. The possessions of wives automatically became their husbands’ property on marriage. This was the law that led Gertrude’s father to refuse her marriage to Henry Cadogan, known to be a gambler. So married women would be denied the vote, while much of the franchise would have been granted to widows, prostitutes, and spinsters. As independent and rational women such as Gertrude and Florence Nightingale felt, women’s suffrage could not be addressed until the property laws were transformed.
Matters such as health, schooling, men’s leisure activities, social services, the Poor Laws, subsistence benefit, and the workhouses and almshouses were dealt with by local government. In these issues Florence Bell and most of the women she knew were involved up to the hilt. Unfortunately, when they and other women across Britain achieved the local vote, men rioted in the streets of several towns. These women dreaded a reaction to the demands of the suffragists—who kept within the law—and the suffragettes—who broke it—that would bring retribution and destroy the advances that women had already made.
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