Close reading : translation, re-writing, and reviewing in Anna Banti and Virginia Woolf

• Main Author: Galloway, C.
• Published: University of Cambridge 2003
• Subjects: 800
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.599284

This thesis argues that an examination of literary translation offers a way to rethink the ongoing reading 'encounter' between authors, and makes explicit some of the hidden concerns of texts such as the development of style, the role of the reader, and writerly affinities. 'Close reading', then, is understood as simultaneously methodology and metaphor, and has as its primary focus here the work of Anna Banti (1895-1985) and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). The thesis moves from a specific consideration of a translating 'moment' (Banti's 1950 Italian translation of Woolf's 1992 novel, Jacob's Room) through considerations of reception and how texts 'travel', and the re-writing by both authors of themes such as history, auto/biography, and the role of the woman writer, to the further re-viewings of their texts as film. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's work on the 'afterlife' of art and on the 'continua of transformation' present in the work of translation, and on accounts of reading, writing and affinity, I will demonstrate that cultural boundaries and literary categories are porous and mutable, endlessly open to correspondence with other times, places and media.