Everything you need to know about Virginia Woolf

With a profuse work that accompanied the fiery beginning of the 20th century, Virginia Woolf It is a benchmark of English and universal literature. Author of great works such as Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, Waves, A room of my own and Tres guineas, with his gaze and his depth, he changed the perception of what could be done with a text. But not only that: she was also a great feminist activist so that women had the same opportunities as men in the vocation of being writers.

Perhaps due to the influence of certain films – such as The hours, of Stephen Daldry (2002) -, it is often thought that she was a lonely, melancholic woman, with personal ghosts that haunted her relentlessly. This is one of the myths that your biographer Irene Chikiar Bauer It has shown that, if it is not entirely false, it is grossly exaggerated.

The author of the first biography of Virginia Woolf in Spanish, Virginia Woolf. Life in writing —A job that took him more than seven years and led to a monumental work of almost 1000 pages — and a brand-new Doctor of Literature with an investigation into the links between Woolf and Victoria Ocampo, spoke in an interview by Patrick zunini of everything one should know about the great English author.

The meeting was held within the framework of Let’s read experience, the cycle that the Leamos.com platform organizes as an exclusive benefit for its subscribers. The full talk can be seen on the Leamos site; here we publish some excerpts.

—What was the relationship between Virginia Woolf and Victoria Ocampo like? Woolf was said not to take Victoria entirely seriously.

—They met in 1934 and their relationship had consequences in the Argentine literary field because Victoria made the decision to publish Virginia Woolf for the first time in Spanish at the same time that she was producing. I made several discoveries that make Victoria can be read differently: it is very significant that she founded the magazine Sure almost at the moment he read “A Room Of My Own,” for example. In addition, Victoria takes some ideas from Virginia Woolf about that the common non-specialized reader must be valued, that reading has to be for pleasure and free and that each reader can interpret freely. Victoria Ocampo will say all her life that she is a common reader.

—With which Virginia book do you begin to translate it?

—He asks for a letter and Virginia goes on proposing. Obviously A room of my own he wants to translate it yes or yes. But then he translates the rest. The most interesting thing, in addition to the fact that she translated all of Virginia’s fiction, is that Victoria reads the essays although she does not translate them, except for the feminist essays. Victoria Ocampo sent Virginia Woolf a box of butterflies as a gift: she knew that Virginia hunted and collected them as a girl; In Virginia Woolf’s work, butterflies appear twenty-odd times in different scenes of her fiction work and she imagined the pampas populated by butterflies. I believe that the friendship between Victoria and Virginia, which, like all friendship, had the odd misunderstanding, had consequences, not only in Victoria’s way of writing, which changed after 1929, but also in the Argentine and editorial level. of Hispanic letters.

—How does Borges receive the work of Virginia Woolf?

—They ask you to translate A room of my own and Orlando and he takes up the challenge. Then he says that, in fact, his mother helped him in one of those. Leave that question at that. There is an interview book by Osvaldo Ferrari, where he asks Borges about Virginia Woolf and Borges, well, with women it was not very celebratory. Borges’s translation has been revised in recent years by feminist translations. First in Chile and now also in Argentina, because he did not take advantage of the ambiguity of the use of the article “the”, which in English is feminine and masculine, as well as certain ironies of Virginia Woolf.

—What was Virginia’s relationship with James Joyce like?

“She reads it early and loves it.” The problem with the Ulises is that it could not be published in England or in almost any part of Europe. Eliot highly recommends that she publish it, but the Virginia publisher and her husband, the Hogarth Press, was small and ends up rejecting it because it could not handle book size. Virginia also had a question of admiration and a little envy with Joyce and with Katherine Mansfield. There is a striking fact which is that in one of the last entries in her diary she continues to talk about Joyce. Almost in the last moments of her life she continues to reflect on Joyce.

—Where should one start reading Virginia Woolf?

—There are many Virginia Woolfs because she didn’t want to repeat herself. Each book had to be different from the previous one. You like poetry? An incomparable poetic prose is Waves. Do you want to read something funny about a pet that tells you about the lives of its owners? Flush. Do you want to read the life of a boy who appears in Shakespeare’s time, changes gender, becomes a woman and ends up going through all the ages of England? Orlando. Are you interested in feminist issues? There are the trials Tres guineas and A room of my own. Are you interested in essay writing? There are six volumes of essays where she comments on all English literature.

—With your essays, Virginia Woolf anticipates the feminism debate. Are your speeches still current is it proposed a dated debate?

—There are certain things that have to do with the time, but the genius does not expire. Virginia Woolf, who like Victoria Ocampo had no formal education, says in A room of my own that in a hundred years women will be able to write and say “we have our own tradition.” She wrote it in 1929 and I say that it is being fulfilled. We are in 2020 and at this moment we are talking about the boom of women.

See the full interview in Leamos Experience.

Let’s read is a new way of living books and reading. A community that lives the pleasure of reading, that enjoys living stories, sharing them, talking and debating. Every week in Leamos Experience there are new conversations with writers, musicians, politicians, actors, philosophers, psychologists. You can also participate in reading workshops and an exclusive readers’ club for subscribers. Get informed and start enjoying all the activities right now.

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