Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Spelling, Translation and Transliteration
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Reading the Russians, or Translation as Explanation
- 1 Unknown Languages and Unruly Selves: Thinking through Translation
- 2 ‘Representing by Means of Scenes’: Translating Voices
- 3 ‘The queerest sense of echo’, or Translating Imprudent Movables
- 4 Editors’ Choice: Craftsmanship and the Marketplace
- 5 Biographical Writing in Translation, or Variations on the Meaning of ‘Life’
- Conclusion: Only Inter-connect? Translation, Transaction, Interaction
- Bibliography
- Index
Conclusion: Only Inter-connect? Translation, Transaction, Interaction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Spelling, Translation and Transliteration
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Reading the Russians, or Translation as Explanation
- 1 Unknown Languages and Unruly Selves: Thinking through Translation
- 2 ‘Representing by Means of Scenes’: Translating Voices
- 3 ‘The queerest sense of echo’, or Translating Imprudent Movables
- 4 Editors’ Choice: Craftsmanship and the Marketplace
- 5 Biographical Writing in Translation, or Variations on the Meaning of ‘Life’
- Conclusion: Only Inter-connect? Translation, Transaction, Interaction
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
‘Everything she feels and hears and sees is not fragmentary and separate; it belongs together as writing.’
(Virginia Woolf writing on Katherine Mansfield; EVW 4: 447)Looking for Woolf, Mansfield and modernist aesthetics in Koteliansky's co-translations can resemble the same sort of will-o’-the-wisp quest that Woolf evokes when trying to seize Mrs Brown; their objective truth must remain ‘a dancing light’, ‘and illumination’, ‘gleams and flashes’ from which the critic tries to build a solid, coherent narrative (EVW 3: 387–8). In fact, this dancing play of possible truths that can never be pinned down is very much consonant with the two writers’ reception of Russian literature. Despite her archetypally English name, Mrs Brown emerges in Woolf's essay as the ‘compelling embodiment of the enduring impact of Russian writers and their subjects on Woolf's imagination’ (Rubenstein 2009: 155). And the image of catching not will-o’-the-wisps but sunbeams was one Woolf herself had co-translated:
I once came into the dining-room downstairs […] and saw that a ray of the sun fell across the whole room through the windows and made a bright spot on the sideboard which stood by the wall opposite the window. The ventilator was not tight shut and was moved by the wind, and as it moved the bright spot slid over the sideboard. I went in, showed the children the bright spot, and cried out: ‘Catch it!’ They all threw themselves on to the bright spot to catch it, but it raced, and it was difficult to catch it. (TWK: 245)
Meanwhile Chekhov is the writer remembered by Gorky for having tried to catch sunbeams in his hat (Gorky 1990: 135). However elusive the sunbeams, the quest has a certain poetic and ethical resonance, like Woolf's butterflies in the dahlias evoked above. And so it is with the co-translations – we must race after rays of light, persuaded they played a part in the makings of the writers and perhaps the shaping of an era, yet with no formal, material evidence that can settle the matter once and for all.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Translation as CollaborationVirginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and S.S. Koteliansky, pp. 171 - 178Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2014