Page 49 - Life of Gertrude Bell

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PERSIAN PICTURES 37
Nine months after Gertrude’s departure Henry Cadogan went
’
to the Lar river in winter and fell into its icy water. He died from
pneumonia within two days.
For the next four years she travelled extensively in Europe and
when she was in England spent as much time as she could with
her family at Redcar. The wounds of her first love healed slowly
and she did not reproach her parents. Indeed she sought solace in
them: ‘Dearest, dearest, I did not think we could ever be closer to
one another than we were, but I understand what love is, and so
what yours is to me. What it is to be back and have my Mother
again! I don’t really want anybody but her, except you — .’ Thus
she wrote to her father soon after her return.
Between her travels she began to write an account of her
journeys in Persia, and to translate the verse of Hafiz. The series
of short essays on the land in which she had travelled and revelled
and finally fallen in love was, in a way, an experiment in writing.
She did it chiefly for her own amusement but friends persuaded
her to show it to a publisher, Richard Bentley, who was keen and
so she allowed it to be sold, though anonymously. Her first book,
Safar Nan/eh: Persian Pictures, a book of travel, did not win
universal acclaim for her literary skill when it appeared in 1894.
But it had enormous charm. ‘Charm but not actual achievement,’
wrote Janet Hogarth.
Three years later in 1897 she was to publish her first and only
verse, a translation from the Divan of Hafiz. The work was pre­
faced by a masterly critical essay which included a life of the II
Persian poet comparing him to his contemporary, Dante. She
drew on Goethe, Villon and other poets of the West for her
comparative assessment, showing the breadth of her reading and
the depth of her critical vision. The work was an eloquent state­
ment of the varied and complex attributes of Gertrude’s brilliant
mind, of her astonishing sense of word-play, her intellectual
vitality, and not least of her temerity, for she had started to
learn Persian a mere two years before she began to translate the
work of the finest writer in the language. Her assurance would
have been envied by many a recognised expert on Persian litera­
ture, as indeed would the achievement. The distinguished
Koranic scholar A. J. Arberry has said of her translations:
‘Though some twenty hands have put Hafiz into English, her
rendering remains the best!’ He was speaking in 1947. Perhaps