Woolf in Translation: A Study in Linguistic Incompatibility



As part of a study of Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway for my class in AP English Literature, I recently read a critical review of Woolf by Geneviève Brassard entitled "Woolf in Translation". The article centers around Woolf's own argument that the act of translation is in itself a "mutilation" in that translating any work necessarily augments the societal and cultural connotations of that work (for more, see my previous blog post "The Flaws of Translation"). For instance, Brassard describes the way in which a simple mistranslated pronoun in the Polish version of Woolf's Orlando all but destroyed the book's feminist undertones, and how Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges' translations of several of Woolf's essays into Spanish entirely ignored the distinctive class system of 1920s England in which Woolf was writing.

Ultimately, what Brassard advocates in the context of translation can be applied to how we treat cross-cultural interactions in general. Her support of a greater degree of sensitivity to differing cultural and historical contexts, while undeniably applicable to Woolf's work in the 1920s, is all the more relevant in today's globalized yet still heavily divided cultural landscape.

Source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118457917.ch31

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