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Contributors
- Edited by Allison Pease, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York
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- The Cambridge Companion to <I>To The Lighthouse</I>
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6 - Reality and Perception
- Edited by Allison Pease, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York
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- The Cambridge Companion to <I>To The Lighthouse</I>
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- 05 December 2014
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Bibliography of works cited
- Emily Dalgarno, Boston University
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- Virginia Woolf and the Migrations of Language
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- 07 October 2011
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- 06 October 2011, pp 196-211
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Frontmatter
- Emily Dalgarno, Boston University
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Conclusion
- Emily Dalgarno, Boston University
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Summary
Throughout this study I have been concerned with the effects on Woolf’s writing practice of those translations from Greek, Russian, and French by means of which she created the historical moment when feminist history might challenge the assumptions of the dominant culture. Her response to translation reveals the importance of language in her methods as a historian, in a narrative that is marked by her position as an imperial subject. Woolf first studied foreign languages within the institutions of the British educational system, whose ideals are reflected in the essays of Matthew Arnold. His position is the referent of her theories of “knowing” Greek and of translation as focused largely on semantics. Her major translation essay, “On Not Knowing Greek,” was written when, after completing her university courses, she undertook, with Janet Case, an education in Greek philosophy and tragedy that was the backbone of her writing career. In her early translation of the ancient Greeks she worked in the shadow of Arnold, the effects of whose ideas persisted throughout her life. Although she resisted his attempts to maintain the dominant paradigm, some of her lifelong habits suggest that she continued to work within the limits that Arnold imposed on the translator, in particular his attention to the translation of individual words. His preoccupation with semantics assumes that to establish equivalence between the vocabularies of two languages is the central task of the translator. Woolf’s tendency to focus on the translation of love or soul, for instance, maintains links not only with Arnold’s methods but with her own marginal retranslation of individual words in Agamemnon as well.
Yet a theory of translation that is now considered outmoded led Woolf into new territory, as though a single word might open onto another world. She wrote in 1938 that reading “translations of Greek verse . . . is like an aeroplane propeller invisibly quick and unconscious” (D5: 131). The startling image suggests the immediacy of her surrender to a Greek text, as well as its centrifugal effect on her mind. For instance the continuing effect of Shelley’s translation of the Symposium, in particular the untranslated word for love between men, is apparent in the many ways that she too sought to bring into the public domain a discourse in which language might name same-sex love. Translations from other languages had a similar effect. In the work of Dostoyevsky and Proust she discovered an attention to soul that was missing in the work of the British novelists of her generation. Her diary as well as her fiction reveals that soul, a key word in their fiction that was never adequately translated, kept open a window onto the unknown and untranslatable that was the lodestar of her spiritual search for what eludes representation. The extraordinary significance of key words in her novels – light in Jacob’s Room, plunge in Mrs. Dalloway, or flounder in To the Lighthouse – suggests the capacity of the single word to organize narrative.
Chapter 1 - Translation and ethnography in “On Not Knowing Greek”
- Emily Dalgarno, Boston University
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- Virginia Woolf and the Migrations of Language
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The translator is the secret master of the difference of languages, not in order to abolish the difference but in order to use it to awaken in his own language, through the violent or subtle changes he brings to it, a presence of what is different, originally, in the original.
Maurice Blanchot, “Translating,” Friendship (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997)Woolf’s essay “On Not Knowing Greek” in The Common Reader (1925) captures the historical moment when Victorian debates about the proper way to translate Greek were giving way to a broader interpretation of classical culture that linked it to events in the twentieth century. Together with “The Russian Point of View” and “Montaigne” it suggests the need to modify the perception of this volume of her essays as “meditations on English writers for English audiences.” Rather translation creates a reader whose position in the world is contingent on history and ethnology. Woolf prepared to write the essay by immersing herself for several months in rereading Greek tragedy and Plato, with the aim of drawing the common reader into an area that was governed by the university dons, in particular Matthew Arnold and Francis Newman, whom she does not name, and a poet, Shelley, whom she does. Moving back and forth between her citations in Greek and from R. C. Jebb’s translations, Woolf blends Greek tragedy with an ethnographic sketch of Greek culture to create the sense that English is as foreign as Greek.
The title of the essay refers to the decades-long controversy about the teaching of Greek in British schools and universities that went on roughly from the 1870 debate on the Tripos at Cambridge until 1920, and deeply affected her understanding of the social significance of translation. Suzanne L. Marchand’s densely factual study, Down from Olympus: Archeology and Philhellenism in Germany 1750–1970, studies the German precursors of the debate in England. She details the background of “rapturous Graecophilia” that she dates from the time of Schiller to the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s. Her study of Altertumswissenschaft begins with the shift in classical study in the eighteenth century from individual passion to institutional ideal. By the nineteenth century, study of the ancient world “was dominated by scholars trained in philology, the art of textual emendation and interpretation.” Tracing the career of F. A. Wolf (1759–1824), she demonstrates that by the end of the eighteenth century Prussian classicism was dedicated to “the production of ‘disinterested,’ nonpopular, historical scholarship and contempt for comparative, ethnographic, and broadly philosophical questions.” The excavation of Olympia (1875–1881) began a series of grand-scale excavations that changed the history of Greek art to include pottery and the minor arts which in effect challenged the dominance of philology.
Chapter 6 - Assia Djebar and the poetics of lamentation
- Emily Dalgarno, Boston University
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- Virginia Woolf and the Migrations of Language
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Summary
Haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony.
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 46The abusive translation, which in Philip E. Lewis’ essay forces a reinterpretation of the original work, finds its home in postcolonial literature when the translator’s primary concern is no longer to translate a text from one into another dominant language. While it is true that Assia Djebar cites a Woolf short story in a text she wrote in French, the more significant role of translation is to be found in their reading of lamentation in Antigone as a means to question the policies of the twentieth-century state, and in scenes where narrative strategy begins with the act of translating the mourning cry. In the aftermath of war the scene of female mourning provides the occasion to “renew the energy and signifying behavior that a translation is likely to diffuse.” In the work of Woolf and Djebar the narrator participates in the female rites of mourning, while charging herself with their translation into a dominant language that has hitherto been deaf to their cries of grief. The female narrator who resists assimilating the mourning cry to the conventions of narrative that demand closure establishes an ethical position that is derived from translation.
The premise of Lewis’ argument is that the translator cannot overcome the difference between the two texts. He acknowledges the cultural difference between the word abusive in English, and in French where it means false, deceptive, misleading (and in my Hachette dictionary excessive and unfair as well), as he considers the willingness of an English-speaking audience to tolerate a typically French elliptical use of language. The translator’s predicament is that since the referential structures of English and French are not identical, an adequate translation is unlikely. The problem for the translator is to move away from the logic of identity, and rather to compensate for losses and justify differences. Lewis queries how much freedom to grant the translator’s interpretation, and whether the abusive translation can become a model. “The translator’s aim is to rearticulate analogically the abuse that occurs in the original text, thus to take on the force, the resistance, the densification that this abuse occasions in its own habitat, yet, at the same time, also to displace, remobilize, and extend this abuse in another milieu where, once again, it will have a dual function – on the one hand, that of forcing the linguistic and conceptual system of which it is a dependent, and on the other hand, of directing a critical thrust back toward the text that it translates and in relation to which it becomes a kind of unsettling aftermath.” Yet in these difficult and unpromising conditions, it seems to me that Woolf’s and Djebar’s translation of Antigone, and Djebar’s interpretation of Woolf’s challenges to the language of colonialism, demonstrate that despite, or perhaps because of, these cultural differences the translation of Woolf’s work exerts an unsettling and energizing force both on the work of a postcolonial novelist and in retrospect on her own.
Chapter 5 - Translation and iterability
- Emily Dalgarno, Boston University
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Summary
A text lives only if it lives on [sur-vit], and it lives on only if it is at once translatable and untranslatable.
Jacques Derrida, “Living On: Border Lines,” Deconstruction and Criticism (1979), 102It would be misleading to conclude that the impact of translation on Woolf’s language was of interest only to readers in the English-language community. The overall argument of this book would not be complete without some study of foreign writers who share her sense that translation in postcolonial culture resists what Bakhtin has called the centralizing tendency of European languages, in order to create a space that is defined by crossing borders. In the process translators abandon a commitment to accuracy in order to accommodate the historical contingency of the sign. Scenes from several of Woolf’s novels play out the social consequences of Derrida’s “iterability,” that is the sign read in the absence of either the sender or the receiver. In such circumstances the translation becomes heuristic, in the sense that it sends the reader back to interpret the relationship between or among texts.
The distinguishing features of Woolf’s vision of translation emerge most distinctly in the perspective of European writers whose experience of nations and nationality was diasporic. In her work we see that moving a text into a different language and culture asks new questions and creates a new reader. In my reading, a sentence or two hitherto unexamined in one of her paragraphs makes theoretical sense when read in the context of European discourses of translation. The striking difference is that whereas Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida assumed the institutional position of translator-as-heir, as a British female Woolf occupied a different position. Although her family legacy and her position as a co-founder of the Hogarth Press are the marks of social authority, one has only to recall the role of entail in the fortunes of Vita Sackville-West to realize how contingent was the agency of a female in matters of inheritance. In such a split position Woolf emphasized instead the changing role of the reader, and translation as a linguistic activity with specific results for language and culture. In effect she shifted the discourse from an ethnographic emphasis on translation and filiation, to her observations of the way that translation alienates one’s own language, and in so doing she raised an entirely different set of questions.
Preface
- Emily Dalgarno, Boston University
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Preface
Throughout this work I have continued to ask how the richness and historical depth of Woolf ’s language become apparent in the context of translation. Woolf’s expressed desire to transform the English language always seemed to me a measure of her ambition and stature as a writer, and a goal scarcely to be imagined. A study of her vocabulary shows that she gave us relatively few new words. How then did transformation come about? After “On Not Knowing Greek” her thoughts on translation are scattered throughout her fiction, essays, and diaries. Although her response to works of Russian fiction and to Proust shaped her writing practice significantly, there is no further essay on translation, perhaps because the language of the Victorian translator of Greek was no longer suitable, and others were not yet in circulation. Like the German Hellenists of her generation she learned that the translation of classical texts can be used to mount challenges to the ideology of national governments. Reading Proust with Vita Sackville-West suggested to Woolf that the language of gender comes into existence on the borders of consciousness, at the moment of awakening. Such a study enhances our sense of her language as responding to its history, and hospitable to the rhetorical strategies of other western languages.
The experience of a semester at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis greatly enhanced my understanding of translation and the social and political relationships among languages. My thanks to the Director, Michael J. Pretina, who arranged seminars with other fellows, and glimpses of the culture of Marseilles that widened the scope of my study, to include not only my chapter on Proust, but also work on Assia Djebar.
Abbreviations
- Emily Dalgarno, Boston University
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Index
- Emily Dalgarno, Boston University
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Chapter 2 - Antigone and the public language
- Emily Dalgarno, Boston University
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Is there no guidance nowadays for a reader who yields to none in reverence for the dead, but is tormented by the suspicion that reverence for the dead is vitally connected with understanding the living?
Virginia Woolf, “How It Strikes a Contemporary” (1923), The Common ReaderVirginia Woolf’s analysis of the links between patriarchy and Fascism has been the focus of most studies of Three Guineas, but another aspect of German culture that is focused on the politics of translation shows how her Antigone writes history by challenging the vocabulary of public discourse. I read Woolf’s figure of Antigone in the context of European classical studies which sought to connect ancient Greek thought to events in twentieth-century history. The grand scale of the problem is indicated by the number of philosophers, poets, and classicists in Germany and France whose study led them to new readings of Sophocles. George Steiner offers a broad analytical survey from Hegel and Hölderlin to Benjamin and Sartre. Miriam Leonard has studied the role of classical scholars in the political upheavals in France since 1945, when scholars “used classical figures to explore the nature of the citizen/subject in relation to politics and ethics.” Whereas translation in “On Not Knowing Greek” is a way of coming to terms with mourning “the vast catastrophe of the European war,” the translation of Antigone read in the context of contemporary European interpretations motivates the reader to rewrite history from the perspective of that mourning.
Woolf’s Antigone is the figure who interrogates the European institution of dictatorship not only by the force of her will and character but by her insistence on taking the fight to language. To abstract her from the play and from the centuries of its interpretation results in moralizing her figure in order to mirror the twentieth-century reader’s expectations that she become the girl who sacrificed her life to defy a dictator. The humanist reading takes for granted that Antigone is a female figure. To do so, argues Olga Taxidou, is to “take the discursive construct of the human/female Antigone as a finished product that then stands in for their interpreted Antigone,” a process that is based on the assumption of “the separability of watching/reading and doing” as well as on an “empathic reading of character.” By overlooking the conditions of performance a humanist reading of the play fails to grasp the centrality of a politicized mourning, or the challenge to the assumption of a “reconstructed line of hermeneutics from the Greeks straight to the twentieth century.”
Chapter 4 - Proust and the fictions of the unconscious
- Emily Dalgarno, Boston University
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My great adventure is really Proust. Well – what remains to be written after that?
(To Roger Fry, Oct. 3, 1922: L2: 565)Woolf’s work took a new direction after 1922, the year in which she began to read À la recherche du temps perdu. Proust helped to shape the emphasis on feeling that is so problematic in her early work into a prose whose aim was to transform feeling into the language of spiritual apprehension. Her reading notes, “The Hours” manuscript, and her diaries reveal that several of the questions that she put to herself as she worked were in fact loose translations of particular passages in the Recherche where Proust engaged questions of memory and language. She responded, for instance, to Proust’s idea that the adjacent world of sleep focuses attention on the moment of awakening, when the sleeper leaves the place of dreams for the language of the waking world. Woolf read Proust largely in the translation of C. K. Scott Moncrieff, who simplified Proust’s extensive vocabulary of words for mental functions, by reducing it to conscious and unconscious. Although his translation conveniently brought the novel into territory familiar to English readers of Freud, his mistranslations resulted in Woolf’s preference for the Proustian image of the unconscious as the source, not of error and struggle as in Freud’s work, but of the artist’s unique access to the underwater world of the mind.
Although Woolf’s notes on the Recherche cover only the first two books, Swann’s Way and Guermantes, she and Vita Sackville-West read Sodome et Gomorrhe together. At the point where Woolf’s response to particular passages is less demonstrable at the level of language, the presence of Proust in her theory of writing may better be understood in terms of translation as interpretation. Woolf shared with Proust a sense of the unseen world that lies behind the seen, which is sometimes the world of the dead, and sometimes the hidden world of sexual preferences and behaviors that the narrator is forbidden to avow. The sign that represents a world so divided creates a text designed to accommodate historical controversies and contradictions, and is necessarily contingent. Scenes of translation in Orlando seize the occasion when a term that is undergoing redefinition becomes untranslatable, as a means to undermine the sign. As in the Recherche the naked female body prompts a scene of awakening that questions the language of sexual identity, while the text relegates gender to the arcane vocabularies of law and grammar. The final pages of Woolf’s novel rewrite the relationship of the translator to a dual readership in order to mediate the contradictions created by the untranslatable word.
The migrations of language: introduction
- Emily Dalgarno, Boston University
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Summary
The need to change the structure of the English sentence in order better to meet the requirements of women writers is a constant theme in the work of Virginia Woolf. She wrote during a period when the goals of translation were undergoing fundamental changes that enlarged and facilitated that project. The British translator who was compelled to observe the ethnocentric standards of Greek translation in the university evolved within a few decades into a figure whose aim, in response to the demands of colonial readers, was to mediate between cultures. It is the argument of this book that although Woolf read translations to acquaint herself with the diverse cultures of the world, as a writer she quickly learned to use translation as a means to resist the tendency of the dominant language to control meaning, the first step to remodeling semantics and syntax. My work is oriented towards the classic essays on translation by Roman Jakobson and Walter Benjamin, and several works by Jacques Derrida that link translation to larger questions of nationality and otherness. When read together with Woolf’s essays and the scenes of translation in her novels they reveal the scope of her attempts to redesign the sentence and to recreate the dominant language.
Throughout her career Woolf moved with ease among her roles as writer and as reader, translator, and publisher of foreign texts. Over the twenty or so years that she studied Greek she translated a number of texts, notably Agamemnon, undertaken while she was drafting Mrs. Dalloway. Like others of her class she read French, although unlike Lytton Strachey and Vita Sackville-West she was not bilingual. She and Leonard studied Russian briefly, and her numerous essays on Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy, together with the work of the Hogarth Press, helped to develop a British readership for Russian fiction. Two notebooks are filled with her exercises as she studied Italian. She evolved a position in which she might use a translation to read an entire work quickly and grasp it as a whole, while retaining her student’s understanding of the structure and limits of the original language. Although she both deplored and supported the need for translation, she was clearly someone for whom foreign languages redrew the map of the world.
Virginia Woolf and the Migrations of Language
- Emily Dalgarno
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Virginia Woolf's rich and imaginative use of language was partly a result of her keen interest in foreign literatures and languages - mainly Greek and French, but also Russian, German and Italian. As a translator she naturally addressed herself both to contemporary standards of translation within the university, but also to readers like herself. In Three Guineas she ranged herself among German scholars who used Antigone to critique European politics of the 1930s. Orlando outwits the censors with a strategy that focuses on Proust's untranslatable word. The Waves and The Years show her looking ahead to the problems of postcolonial society, where translation crosses borders. In this in-depth study of Woolf and European languages and literatures, Emily Dalgarno opens up a rewarding new way of reading her prose.
Chapter 3 - Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and the Russian soul
- Emily Dalgarno, Boston University
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Of all those who feasted upon Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Tchekhov during the past twenty years, not more than one or two perhaps have been able to read them in Russian. Our estimate of their qualities has been formed by critics who have never read a word of Russian, or seen Russia, or even heard the language spoken by natives; who have had to depend, blindly and implicitly, upon the work of translators.
(E4: 182)Woolf’s reading of Tolstoy as a novelist/historian enabled the revisionist view of history that is apparent in the structure of Mrs. Dalloway and The Years. Her interest in the Russian “soul” on the other hand, in the works of Dostoyevsky and Chekhov, is manifested throughout her stories and novels, and the study of soul in the diaries poignantly records her spiritual hunger. During the period 1912–25 Woolf learned some Russian, collaborated on a translation, and as a publisher and essayist helped to promote the sales of Russian works. Whereas most members of Woolf’s class read French and were familiar with other western European languages, the sudden popularity of Russian fiction in the translations of Constance Garnett opened new paths of circulation in a language that was totally foreign to most English readers. Woolf began reading the Russian novel in 1912 on her honeymoon, when on the recommendation of Lytton Strachey she read a French translation of Crime and Punishment, Le crime et le châtiment. As Garnett’s translations gradually became available, Woolf broadened her reading list to include not only Dostoyevsky, but Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Chekhov, and she read as well some lesser-known writers, Aksakov and Bunin. Leonard gave her a copy of Garnett’s translation of The Brothers Karamazov in 1912; she presented him with The Idiot in 1913, and The Insulted and the Injured in 1915.
Russian literature boosted the fortunes of the Hogarth Press during the period 1920–3. Sales of Russian writers overshadowed all previous publications save those by T. S. Eliot and Virginia. Laura Marcus in her analysis of the activities of the Press stressed the heterogeneity of its publications. Although many small presses sprang up in England in the 1920s, most lasted only a few years. That the Hogarth Press survived, and so freed Woolf from the conventional taste of commercial publishers, was owing in part, according to Leonard, to broadening their list, so that in addition to publishing the work of their friends, they began to include translations. Leonard and Virginia were tutored in Russian by S. S. Koteliansky, who brought Russian works to the Press, and they learned enough to collaborate with him on seven Hogarth translations. After the Russian Revolution, sales of Tolstoy’s work outstripped those of other Russians, and the Hogarth Press published four works by and about Tolstoy. Leonard wrote of the translation of Gorky’s Reminiscences of Tolstoy (1920) “that the success of Gorky’s book was really the turning point for the future of the Press and for our future.” In fact eight of the twenty-seven publications of the Press from its founding to 1923 were Russian translations. They together with Kew Gardens decided them “to allow the Press to expand and become professional, respectable, and commercial.” As a book reviewer Woolf contributed to this success. Her reviews of books by and about Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Turgenev, from 1912–25, helped to create an audience for Russian literature. It is significant that these works of translation were outside the purview of the university dons who had so vexed the problem of translating classical texts.
Contents
- Emily Dalgarno, Boston University
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