Free Desert Queen by Janet Wallach

Teheran tea rooms and salons, his allegories discussed and interpreted for hours on end. His words require the most sophisticated understanding of the language; his intricate message demands analysis that few can convey; yet eager to plunge into work, Gertrude took up the challenge to translate his poems.
    For most of the next two years, she worked on the translations of Hafiz, completing them in 1896. The following year, with the addition of her definitive essay comparing the thirteenth-century Hafiz to Western poets such as Dante and the more contemporary Goethe, the book was published. It won rave reviews. As recently as 1974, a noted scholar, A. J. Arberry, commented, “Though some twenty hands have put Hafiz into English, her rendering remains the best!” With the image of Cadogan still vivid in her mind, she could easily relate to the poet’s wrenching heartbreak over the death of his son, expressed in his poem the Divan of Hafiz :
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!
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.
    Still savoring the taste of life in the East, and at the suggestion of Friedrich Rosen (who had learned the language as a child in Jerusalem), Gertrude was now studying Arabic. She found it easy at first, and during the days, reading the tales, she relived her romance with Cadogan. On spare afternoons and evenings, alone in London, she dined with her well-placed friends the Grosvenors, the Stanleys and the Ritchies, made calls on the Portsmouths and on Mrs. Green and Mrs. Ward at their smart at-homes on Russell Square. Momentarily, at least, she could bask in the limelight of the reviews of Persian Pictures.
    Yet in spite of her achievements as an author, in spite of her success in society, and in spite of the fact that she was now twenty-eight years old, she still faced the constraints of Victorian England. “I didn’t go to Lady Pollock’s on Tuesday,” she complained; “I had promised to go to a party at Audley Square and I couldn’t combine the two unchaperoned.”
    Only marriage could save her from the shackles of chaperones and escorts. In the middle of the season of 1896, her Oxford colleague Mary Talbot was liberated when she married the Reverend Winfrid Burrows. Mary was thirty-four, soon pregnant, and “radiant,” Gertrude reported to Janet Hogarth when they met at a tea in London. Janet’s brother David Hogarth, an archaeologist, had just published A Wandering Scholar in the Levant , his first important book, and the two women had a delicious afternoon, comparing notes on friends, on writing, on travel in the East.
    Mary Talbot had been Gertrude’s closest female companion. They had spent endless hours together in London, had traveled together to Italy, and now, taking the train to Yorkshire, Gertrude visited her friend in Leeds. She watched the newlywed couple setting up house in the English countryside and recalled the image of marriage that she and Henry Cadogan had sketched. The future might provide other suitors, but few could fulfill the dream she had shared with him, a life so different from Mary’s, a life of exotic adventure in the East. Still, she held on to the hope of marriage.
    But there were no eligible men in her life. Instead, she fled with her father to Italy, where she walked through the narrow streets of Padua and nearly cried when she entered the square of Saint Mark’s. “The band played,” she wrote in her diary, “and the Piazetta was full of people, and it seemed too silly, but the whole place was full of Henry Cadogan, and too lovely