[Vwoolf] "The Reception of Virginia Woolf in Europe" (2002)

[Stuart N. Clarke]

Since this book is under reconsideration, here are some thoughts:

(1) I always feel guilty about this book.  I read it from cover to cover.  I was intending to review it.  But I just couldn’t.  I was overwhelmed by the information: the number of facts, the amount of research, the sheer volume of stuff.  Then, there are 18 chapters by 18 different people, plus a preface & an intro.  How many sentences do you give to each?

(2) The book is primarily about publishing (translations: which, when, how), but also politics and culture, and articles and reviews of Woolf abroad.  As a bibliographer, I found this fascinating. But this is only part of “reception”.  Most foreign readers read Woolf in translation (Holland may be an exception? the Scandinavian countries?), and Woolf is therefore mediated through these translations.  What sort of Woolf is being “received”?  So, translations should be considered in “reception”.

(3) Most languages get one chapter each.  German gets two – quite rightly, since it was two countries.  Spanish gets three.  Look at the titles: "'A gaping mouth, but no words': Virginia Woolf Enters the Land of Butterflies", which shows how difficult it is to stick to Europe, but shouldn’t this chapter be omitted?  The second sounds fine: "The Emerging Voice: A Review of Spanish Scholarship on Virginia Woolf".  The third, "Virginia Woolf and the Search for Symbolic Mothers in Modern Spanish Fiction: The Case of 'Tres mujeres", is going to struggle to be relevant to the book.

(4) French gets four chapters – utterly disgraceful, not because of their content but because of what’s left out. Reception doesn’t just mean "Virginia Woolf among Writers and Critics: The French Intellectual Scene".  Is there just one mention of common readers, just one?  These chapters confirm one’s prejudices about French intellectuals – they only care about intellectuals.  Ordinary people don’t come within their purview.  A Spanish professor wrote: “In Spain, her books have been largely ignored”.  I have 34 translations – are the Spanish publishers such philanthropists that they don’t care whether Woolf is read or not?  It would be so easy in France and many other countries (esp. ex-dictatorships) to do some preliminary presentation on readers, for the number of copies printed appears in each book.  I want to see more work like Lisbeth Larsson’s "A Thousand Libraries: Swedish Readings of 'A Room of One's Own'" (in "Translating Virginia Woolf", 2012), where library copies were inspected for readers’ comments that they had naughtily written in the books.  Leonard Woolf wrote that it is “said from time to time that the novels have fallen out of fashion and favour and are now read by very few”.  He then gave sales figures to refute this (see his 1968 Foreword to Leaska’s “To the Lighthouse” book).

(5) To some extent the authors were given their heads.  Ten to one, foreign academics who specialise in Woolf have never read her in their own language, and, of those who have, ten to one (my maths isn’t very good) they aren’t interested in reception studies.  So, there’s the question of quality and whom you can choose.  (I thought the Greek chapter was particularly self-serving.)  Obviously, some of the authors needed bringing into line, but could the editors afford to do that?  I’m reminded of James Haule’s intro. to “Editing the Modernist Text” (also 2002): “The present volume aims at no cutting-edge contribution to the field of editorial theory” (p. 8) – you can guess what that meant!

(6) Disappointingly, almost none of the 20 authors found that the 92-page section on foreign translations in the Kirkpatrick Bibliography was of any use.

Stuart
(Day 252)

PS  Sorry for writing “J. Arthur Prufrock” yesterday, instead of “J. Alfred Prufrock” – not the first time I’ve made that mistake.

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