Gertrude Bell and the Poetics of Translation: The Divan of Hafez

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!

Ghazal #14

While Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell (1868–1926) has been the subject of at least eight full-length biographies, the focus on her life has largely been on her cultural and political contributions, especially to Middle East archaeology, travel writing, and the geopolitical events leading to her efforts with T. E. Lawrence for Iraqi independence in 1921; the most recent popular biography by Georgina Howell, Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations, maintains the tradition established at the time of Bell's mysterious death at the age of fifty-eight (a suspicion of suicide¹) when her obituaries referred to her as the Queen of Mesopotamia and lavishly praised her many achievements as a diplomat. Howell's biography identifies Bell as one of the most important women of the twentieth century because of her numerous contributions as a diplomat, explorer and advisor.²

Given her achievements, it is not surprising that these elements of Bell's life have been the focus of most scholarship. Largely overlooked in the critical discussion, however, is her creative work, especially her translation of The Divan of Hafez (Hafiz) despite the fact that it is highly praised by English Orientalist scholars in standard reference books, as well as praised in a contemporary reprint, The Hafez Poems of Gertrude Bell.³ When her translation has been addressed by scholars, it is done briefly and in the context of comparing the quality of Bell's translation with that of others, not with reference to its production history or lyric expression. This critical neglect is all the more surprising

Gertrude Bell

John Sargent, 1923

Frontispiece The Letters of Gertrude Bell, II (Boni & Liveright, 1927)

given that translation theorists have recently begun to address the very issues her work embodies, asserting that translations are an important site of intercultural exchange despite the neglect that they may have received in historical scholarship. Echoing the MLA, Elizabeth Lowe calls these studies "the most important concept in cultural theory today" and points out that many major universities recently have undertaken projects to establish centers for translation studies that examine issues that extend well beyond traditional notions of what this scholarship entails.⁴ By engaging in what she calls "transculturation," translated works provide a new cultural exchange between a reading public that may have stereotypes and other negative opinions about another nation; this exchange provides the "dominant culture" an opportunity to "have their own sense of identity" transformed by exposure to a "non-dominant one" in a sympathetic way that provides opportunities for both cultures to benefit positively. This intercultural exchange is facilitated by understanding all the aspects of translation that have been previously neglected, including how an author frames a translation. Lowe suggests that the only true way to evaluate a translation is to investigate the "myriad decisions that the translator makes when interpreting the original text"; those require the comparative study of many translations, but also investigating the context around a translation.

Feminist scholars have also started to investigate gendered aspects of translation; they agree that translations were often undertaken by women as a means to enter the world of letters denied to them because of their gender. Thus, the source materials that women translators select and their purpose for writing are often part of larger political agendas of social reform. For these women translators, the very language they employ is the site for questioning traditional notions of textual fidelity, hierarchy, meaning and value, not only about artistic creation, but also about the contexts in which translations are undertaken. Their "projects," to use the term most often applied to their undertakings, reveal how gender and other factors contribute to meaning creation.

For Gertrude Bell, translating the Islamic mystical poetry of Hafez was a complex endeavor. To begin, she was an English woman who was a lifelong outspoken atheist translating a...