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

Tue Nov 24 08:57:54 EST 2020

I have to correct something I said: I find I misremembered about the number of copies being produced appearing on books in various countries.  I know I’ve seen something like “x exemplares” – now I can’t find an example!  I was confusing in my mind the deposit ref. (“Dépôt”) with the no. of books printed.

Stuart

From: Helen Southworth 
Sent: Tuesday, November 24, 2020 1:42 PM
To: vwoolf at lists.osu.edu ; Stuart N. Clarke 
Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] "The Reception of Virginia Woolf in Europe" (2002)

Thanks to Stuart for his provocative response to the Reception of VW in Europe.  I’ve found it to be a very useful book, but limited, as Stuart suggests, in part (inevitably) due to its ambitious scope.  

Bravo to Elisa for organizing the Reading conference and for the fine work she is doing on Italian editions of Woolf’s work. Her work can be found on Instagram (https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.instagram.com/italianwoolf_project/__;!!KGKeukY!jNXXs7OWRykISkXNGUgYdJcPouLjHMCKxqxvkeLIBGY89kRDKKMlVXcHmLYnnkRC7NE$ )

I just wanted to mention a couple of other useful sources on French common readers of Woolf: Beth Daugherty’s collections of fan mail (WSA 2006) has letters from several French common readers and Robin Majumdar’s VW: The Critical Heritage has several French reviews.  The recently launched Shakespeare & Co. DH Project shows who borrowed Woolf’s work from Sylvia Beach’s Paris bookshop.  Some readers are anglophone expats, but many are French speakers.  I cover some of Woolf’s French readers (writers, such as de Beauvoir and Cixous, but not necessarily translators of Woolf) in a chapter of my book on Woolf and Colette.

I am currently writing about Woolf and France and have been using the translation folders at the HPA at the U of Reading.  These record attempts by many (often women, often common readers) to translate Woolf into French.  What I have found and hope to present at Elisa’s conference, is that the bigger French publishing houses often got in the way of these common readers, either finding alternative translators or arguing against translating Woolf at all!  I’m also looking at a whole set of lesser studied French translators (pre Yourcenar) who published translations of Woolf’s shorter and longer work, often in magazines and under lesser known imprints.

I’d just like to add that we at MAPP (https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://www.modernistarchives.com__;!!KGKeukY!jNXXs7OWRykISkXNGUgYdJcPouLjHMCKxqxvkeLIBGY89kRDKKMlVXcHmLYnT9OzoIc$ ) would like to build into our DH resource ownership information, reader comments, and marginalia, such as that gathered by Lisbeth Larsson (”naughtily” added, or not!).  If you have scans of any of this kind of information and wouldn’t mind having it made available online, please do share it with us.  We’d be interested in:

    1.. marginalia in copies of Woolf texts (in any language) or in other Hogarth Press texts. 
    2.. ownership information (bookplates, dedications etc) in any Hogarth Press book

Thanks and best,

Helen

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From: Vwoolf <vwoolf-bounces+helen=uoregon.edu at lists.osu.edu> on behalf of Stuart N. Clarke via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, November 24, 2020 1:27 AM
To: vwoolf at lists.osu.edu <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>
Subject: [Vwoolf] "The Reception of Virginia Woolf in Europe" (2002) 

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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