Virginia Woolf: Translation and 'Iterability'

Author(s): Emily Dalgarno

Reviewed work(s):
Source: The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1, Translation (2006), pp. 145-156
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
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Virginia Woolf: Translation and 'Iterability'
EMILY DALGARNO
Boston University

Translation is often assumed to have originated with a sacred text that records
the word of God. In Genesis, after the Tower of Babel was built, the Lord said:
'Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the
beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be
impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language,
that they may not understand one another's speech' (I . 6-7). Derrida, who
throughout his career returned frequently to the topic of translation, focuses
on this passage in 'Des Tours de Babel' (I980). The sacred text is unique in
the sense that 'it lays down the law it speaks about [. . .].The sacred would be
nothing without translation, and translation would not take place without the
sacred; the one and other are inseparable." In a similar vein Walter Benjamin
ends his well-known essay 'The Task of the Translator' (I926) with praise for
the interlinear translation of the Bible: 'to some degree all great texts contain
their potential translation between the lines; this is true to the highest degree
of sacred writings. The interlinear version of the Scriptures is the prototype or
ideal of all translation.'2 The Virginia Woolf who wrote in her notes to Three
Guineas (I938) of a '"God," who is now very generally held to be a conception,
of patriarchal origin, valid only for certain races, at certain stages and times'
is not likely to have paid much attention to the Tower of Babel.3 Yet although
Woolf was coolly sceptical about the Bible, and commonly employed 'god' in
expressions like 'Oh my god', she acknowledged the supernatural freely. Her
narratives pose a philosophical question concerning performative speech as the
mistranslation of the sacred.
Woolf constructs a narrative about translation in her essays and fiction that
starts instead with Aeschylus's Agamemnon and Sophocles' Antigone, plays in
which the relationship of translation to the sacred is complicated by gender.
Woolf translated Agamemnon and read Antigone in translation. She returned
again and again to certain scenes in each play, in which the text brings into
question the grounds of the king's authority and the role of the gods. Let me
illustrate a complex matter by alluding to one scene in Agamemnon, in which
Clytemnestra invites her husband to walk on the tapestry she has laid before
him. Agamemnon at first refuses out of a sense of the limits of mortal power, but
My thanks to the Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France, where as a fellow I worked on this topic.
'Des Tours de Babel', in Difference in Translation, ed. and trans. by Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca,
NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. I65-207 (p. 204). Derrida reaffirms this
position in 'Theology of Translation', in Eyes of the University, trans. by Jan Plug and others
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 64-80.
2 In
Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), pp. 69-82.
3 A Room One's Own. Three
of Guineas, ed. by Michele Barrett (London: Penguin, I993), p. 314;
also: 'Those who have not been forced from childhood to hear it thus dismembered weekly assert
that the Bible is a work of the greatest interest, much beauty, and deep meaning' (p. 3 9).

Yearbook of English Studies, 36. (zoo6), 145-56

) Modern Humanities Research Association 2006
I46 Virginia Woolf: Translation and 'Iterability'
then yields while hoping that the gods do not strike him. Woolf remarks on the
scene that no commentary can exhaust its significance. For my purposes let me
ask some questions about authoritative speech and the sacred. Is Clytemnestra
able to wrest power from a king who has compromised his attitude towards
divine authority? Does the relatively uninflected language in which she asserts
proof and gives commands reveal a speaking position that is cut off from the
gods that Agamemnon acknowledges? The scene in which Antigone confronts
Creon and asks what law of god she has broken is a well-known point of reference
in Three Guineas, to which I shall return. Woolf admired Clytemnestra in 'On
Not Knowing Greek' (1925). But when she writes of her and Antigone in A
Room of One's Own (1929) as women who 'burnt like beacons', the image of
the beacon recalls the signal in Agamemnon which may or may not signify the
victory of Agamemnon and Menelaus.4 Briefly, the importance accorded these
two plays suggests that Woolf derived from them rather than from Scripture
her understanding of the circumstances in which female speech challenges the
speech of the king. Although translation of the Bible inspires Derrida to think
of Benjamin and of himself as 'in the position of heir',5 Woolf sought female
lineage in a non-Hebraic tradition.
The growth of the Hogarth Press during this period suggests the role of
market forces in an era when translations and their reading public were on the
rise. Leonard and Virginia had started the press in 1917, in order to publish 'all
our friends stories'.6 But the success of their translations of works by Tolstoy
after the Russian Revolution changed its character. The Woolfs learnt enough
Russian to work with S. S. Koteliansky on seven translations, whose publication
Leonard noted marked 'the turning point for the future of the Press and for
our future'. As a result the press expanded from 'a small handpress, publishing
the untried works of one's friends' to a house 'with a commitment, however
modest, to European literary culture'.7 Virginia's review of translations of the
novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy contributed to this success. She appealed to
the common reader, who was like herself a member of a reading community
that depended on translation. The exception, also historically determined, was
the ability of members of her class to read French. So she would occasionally
leave a passage of French untranslated, and refused a proposal to translate for
Hogarth a work by Andre Gide, on the grounds that since readers might prefer
to read him in French, there would be no market.8
What follows is neither a history of the translation of Woolf's work, nor
of her own work promoting translations. She read Greek and French well
4 A Room
of One's Own, p. 39.
5 'Des Tours de Babel', p. 179; cf. 'Choosing One's Heritage', in For What Tomorrow: A Dia-
logue, trans. by Jeff Fort, ed. by Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2004), p. 3.
6 Quoted in Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996), p. 362.
7 Quoted in J. H. Willis, jr., Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press, 19r7-
I941 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992), p. 80; cf. Laura Marcus, 'The European
Dimensions of the Hogarth Press', in The Reception of Virginia Woolf in Europe, ed. by Mary Ann
Caws and Nicola Luckhurst (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), pp. 328-56.
8 See, for instance, a passage by George Sand in Three Guineas, p. 323. Cf. a letter to Dorothy
Bussy, 29 November 1924, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne
Trautmann, 6 vols (London: Hogarth, 1975-80), III: 1923-I928 (I977), I44.
 EMILY DALGARNO I47

enough to quote the languages in her holograph reading notes; she had studied
Latin; two of her Italian notebooks remain; and she knew a bit of Russian.
Her fiction and essays reveal that she was well acquainted with the conventions
of translation as it was carried on inside the university, and with the position
of the self-educated common reader who depended on those translations. The
evidence suggests that far from thinking of translation as secondary or derived,
she focused on its semiotics: the representation of sign-making in Agamemnon,
and the debate on love between Antigone and Creon. She saw the re-creation
of the sign as it occurs during the act of translating, and as it is represented in
the plays, as offering the opportunity to forecast a new language. Translation
becomes a special instance of the fact that since the authority of a sacred text
is inherent in translation, no act of understanding can exhaust the meaning of
the sign.

Woolf's fiction is populated by would-be readers whose gender and class posi-
tions link translation to education. In The VoyageOut (I920) the test of literacy
is the ability to read Greek. Mr Ridley asks his niece, 'What's the use of reading
if you don't read Greek? After all, if you read Greek, you need never read any-
thing else.'9 In general university men believe they could read a Greek or Latin
text, while female characters, uncertain whether the Symposium was written in
Latin or Greek, beg for a translation. In Jacob's Room (I922) Jacob and his
friend Bonamy, both unable despite their university education to read Aeschy-
lus or Sophocles, nevertheless believe themselves the embodiment of Greek
values. During a church service a university student reads a translation of Sap-
pho, as though to wall himself off from both Latin and Greek. In Mrs. Dalloway
(I925) the question of reading translations marks class boundaries. That Sep-
timus reads Aeschylus in translation signifies that he is a 'half-educated man',
who reveals his mad aspirations when he imagines hearing the birds speaking
the language he will never learn: Greek.'?
In The Waves ( 93I) the education of the don and the colonial has produced
a spiritual and cultural hunger for the restorative powers of Latin and Greek.
Neville, a don, images translation as opening the possibility of psychic com-
munication with the dead when he imagines that the poem will reanimate his
beloved Percival, who has died in India: 'the poem, I think, is only your voice
speaking. Alcibiades, Ajax, Hector and Percival are also you."' Neville sees
translation as resembling psychic communication with the dead, in which the
translator becomes a conduit for their voices.'2 Louis, the best scholar among
the characters, is an Australian, who believes himself the companion of Plato
and Vergil. In Louis's eyes Latin and Greek have the power to restore a cul-
ture whose traditions have become moribund: 'What the dead poet said, you
have forgotten. And I cannot translate it to you so that its binding power ropes
you in, and makes it clear to you that you are aimless [. . .] and so remove
9 Ed. by Elizabeth Haine (London: Hogarth, 1990), p. 177.
'" Ed. by G. Patton Wright (London: Hogarth, 1990), p. 73.
" p. I 9.
(London: Hogarth, 1990),
2
Douglas Robinson discusses translation as ventriloquism in Who Translates? Translator Sub-
jectivities beyond Reason (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001).
148 Virginia Woolf: Translation and 'Iterability'
that degradation which, if you are unaware of your aimlessness, pervades you,
making you senile, even while you are young' (p. 6I). In Louis's eyes trans-
lation would have the power to re-create cultural memory. Since in the novel
no reading community outside the university shares his love of Greek and
Latin, translations might bridge the gap between educated men and everyone
else. The Waves suggests that otherwise university education will become so
marginal that it will be able neither to write history nor to invent tradition.
In The Years (I937) translation maintains the boundaries of gender and of
university education in colonial Britain. Sara Pargiter is the common reader,
who puts to novel use the translation of Antigone prepared by her cousin Ed-
ward, who is a don. Giving the text her divided attention, she skips here and
there and invents a happy ending. When she reads that in fact Antigone is
buried alive, she unconsciously mimics burial in the way she positions her own
limbs in bed. Edward is a translator who is intent on getting the sense right:
'Little negligible words now revealed shades of meaning, which altered the
meaning. He made another note; that was the meaning [. . .].There it was clean
and entire.'"3 Yet Edward, when he identifies his beloved Kitty (who marries
someone else) with Antigone, like Sara unconsciously yields to the ideology of
gender. He reads male desire into the text, Sara the buried life of the Victorian
female. When later in the narrative Edward refuses his nephew North's request
that he translate a line from Antigone, he uses his knowledge of Greek to deny
the hunger of the uneducated mind.
The Greek texts that Woolf read and translated were chosen for her in con-
formity with the curriculum of a university whose intellectual authority was
maintained by the discipline of translation. Because women were denied mat-
riculation, the study of Greek at home comprised all her formal education.
After briefly attending a class in Greek, and being tutored by Clara Pater,
Woolf studied with Janet Case, a scholar who taught her the details of Greek
grammar and chose the texts. She set her young student to work on a series
of projects translating Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Aeschylus, and Euripides.
Woolf's notes on Phaedrus, Euthyphro, and The Symposium are preserved, and
the image of the cave found everywhere in her work suggests that she read The
Republic as well. She annotated the Odyssey. She read Agamemnon and Euripi-
des' Bacchae in Greek, and other Greek plays in English or French. As a result
of this experience she approached Greek texts not like Sara Pargiter, but as a
critical reader. Sir Richard Jebb's translation of Sophocles displeased her: 'he
never risks anything in his guesses: his sense of language seems to me stiff, safe,
prosaic and utterly impossible for any Greek to understand. Jebb splits them
[phrases] up into separate and uncongenial accuracies.'14 Like Edward Pargiter,
he is the translator who leaves out of account the needs of the common reader.
The appearance of the bilingual edition addressed the educational disadvan-
tage of the common reader. When in I917 Woolf reviewed the second volume of
the Loeb Classical Library, an edition of The Greek Anthology, she adopted the
position of a reader whom the bilingual edition had 'given the means of being
13 Ed. by Hermione Lee, Oxford World's Classics (Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 1992), p. 42.
14 The Letters of Virginia Woolf, II: I9I2-I922 (1976), 221.
 EMILY DALGARNO I49

an open and unabashed amateur, and made to feel that no one pointed the finger
of scorn at him on that account'. The translation in a bilingual edition permits
the reader to read quickly so as to foster the impression that he understands
Aeschylus: 'without this conviction the reading of the classics is apt to become
insipid'. She speaks from her experience of studying Greek, whose difficulties
are not sufficiently recognized, and comments that those who can read Sopho-
cles 'are about as singular as acrobats flying through space from bar to bar'.I5
A few years later in 1923, after many years of study, Woolf wrote of bilingual
editions: 'I now know how to read Greek quick (with a crib in one hand) & with
pleasure."6
In 'On Not Knowing Greek', a long essay written especially for The Common
Reader (1925), the common reader who seeks spiritual consolation turns to the
Greeks. The essay exploits the contradictions of Woolf's historical position.
As a female she would be 'at the bottom of any class of schoolboys'.17 Yet she
argues against her gender position, sounding like one of her male characters,
that 'It is useless, then, to read Greek in translations. Translators can but of-
fer us a vague equivalent' (p. 36). Perhaps the common reader became more
certain of her tastes after the war. As a survivor of 'the vast catastrophe of the
European war [when] our emotions had to be broken up for us, and put at an
angle from us, before we could allow ourselves to feel them in poetry or fiction',
she recognizes the temptation to 'read into Greek poetry not what they have
but what we lack' (pp. 34-35). The Greeks, with a sense of what lay 'on the
far side of language', are able to say 'as if for the first time, "Yet being dead
they have not died"' (p. 34). More aware than we of 'a ruthless fate', they offer
an alternative to 'the vagueness [. . .] the confusion, of the Christianity and its
consolations, of our own age' (p. 38). Conditions of mourning in the post-war
era opened the horizons of language outward towards the unintelligible.
Woolf's line-by-line translation of Agamemnonreveals her focus on the condi-
tions of sign-making. As she was drafting Mrs. Dalloway and 'On Not Knowing
Greek', she wrote: 'I should be at Aeschylus, for I am making a complete edi-
tion, text, translation, & notes of my own-mostly copied from Verrall; but
carefully gone into by me.'"8 In her notebook the Greek text is printed on the
right side of the page with a word here and there translated in Woolf's hand in
the margin, and on the left appears her largely unrevised reading text. Since
at least a dozen translations of Agamemnon were in print by I922, what is the
significance of this laborious work completed by a writer then aged about forty?
Was it a belated attempt to qualify if only privately for a university degree? She
had no plans to publish it, nor could she have, but it survives among her papers.

15 'The Perfect Language', in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. by Andrew McNeillie, 3 vols
(New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), II, I I4-I9.
16 The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. by Anne Olivier Bell assisted by Andrew McNeillie, 5 vols
(New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977-84), II: 1920-1924 (1978), 273.
17
The Common Reader, ed. by Andrew McNeillie (New York and London: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, I984), pp. 23-38 (p. 23).
I8 The Diary of Virginia Woolf, II, 2 I5. Woolf would have had available A. W. Verrall's bilingual
text, the English/Greek Choephori (I893), as well as his English/Greek Agamemnon (1889 and
1904). Much of the format of the bilingual edition (facing texts and notes at the bottom of the
page) appears to have been his.
I50 Virginia Woolf: Translation and 'Iterability'

Its imagery appears in many forms in her fiction, but here I stress her emphasis
on the historical conditions of sign-making.
Simon Goldhill links the move from certainty to uncertainty in Agamemnon
with its language: 'the gap between signifier and signified, and the gap between
the present (its analysis) and the future (its prediction) are interconnected,
again linking narrative and language in the desire for clarity and control'.I9
Each of the characters and the Chorus of Agamemnon is characterized by a
distinctive pattern of semiotic behaviour, which the Woolf/Verrall translation
emphasizes. The first speech of the Watchman establishes that the problematic
of the play is to 'read meaning in that beacon light', to read history as it is
being made, by associating a visible signifier with a remote signified. In the
well-known image of the pregnant hare torn open the Woolf/Verrall translation
associates prayer with the construction of the sign: the Chorus 'prayed to let the
event accord with these appearances'. Later, when Cassandra remains behind
as Agamemnon enters the house with Clytemnestra, the chorus in the same
translation considers the semiotics of prophecy: 'Why is it that so constantly
my auguring soul shows at the door of this fluttering sign and the prophet-
chant offers itself without bidding or fee?' Clytemnestra's way with the sign
stands out against these hints of the sacred, as in the Woolf/Verrall translation
of her speech to the Chorus after she has murdered Agamemnon: 'By us he
fell, I he died, and we will bury him.'20 By reducing the death of the king to
a material act, her executive language contrasts with speech made tentative by
acknowledgement of the sacred.
In 'On Not Knowing Greek' Woolf described Aeschylus's language as semi-
otic process: 'he will amplify and give us, not the thing itself, but the rever-
beration and reflection which, taken into his mind, the thing has made; close
enough to the original to illustrate it, remote enough to heighten, enlarge, and
make splendid' (p. 3I). Derrida's formulation captures Woolf's project: 'In the
limits to which it is possible, or at least appears possible, translation practices
the difference between signified and signifier.'2 In Woolf's reading Agamem-
non puts into historical context the practice by which 'the thing itself' remains
nameless until identified by a signifier whose aural and visual flexibility she
images as 'reverberation and reflection.'
Woolf customarily divided her day, writing fiction in the morning and essays
later. Since she shuttled back and forth between Greek studies and the novel on
a daily basis, it is not surprising to find that Mrs. Dalloway rewrites Agamemnon
in the language of post-war British society. In 'On Not Knowing Greek' she
quotes in Greek a line in which the Chorus imagines the dream of Menelaus
after Helen has eloped with Paris. Woolf's holograph gives a somewhat awkward
working translation:
He shall pine for her that is far beyond the sea, till he seem, but a phantom lord of
19 Language, Sexuality, Narrative: The 'Oresteia' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1984), P. 19.
20 Thanks to the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature,
the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations, for permission to cite Reel
13 of the papers of Virginia Woolf.
2
Positions, trans. by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I981), p. 20.
 EMILY DALGARNO I5I

the house. Grace of beautiful [sic] the husband hateth: with the want of the eyes all the
passion is gone. Dream-forms stay with him a while, convincing semblances, & offer
delight in vain; for lo, when vainly he thinks to grasp the Phantom, the vision escapes
through the arms and is gone that instant on wings that follow the passing of sleep.
(11. 414-19)

The image of the empty embrace is loosely translated throughout Woolf's

work, for instance in the passage from 'A Sketch of the Past' in which she sees
her father leave the room where his wife has just died: 'My father staggered
from the bedroom as we came. I stretched out my arms to stop him, but he
brushed past me, crying out something I could not catch; distraught.'22 In the
face of death father and daughter inhabit for the moment different worlds not
transcended by translation. In Mrs. Dalloway the image of the empty embrace
refers literally to Peter Walsh's last glimpse of Daisy, the woman he has left
behind in India, as she travels away from him in a dog cart. In his dream on a
park bench it also figures his loss of Clarissa. In the dream the narrator enlarges
the domain of the image; Peter becomes 'the solitary traveller' who encounters
the figure of the anonymous mother who seeks 'a lost son [. . .] the figure of the
mother whose sons have been killed in the battles of the world' (p. 50). In
the manner of the dream these figures have no referent in Peter's waking life.
They raise the question whether the dream, which assimilates his personal loss
to the catastrophe of the First World War, in some way manifests the world
of the dead. The narrator in each of these passages emphasizes a world of
apprehension/comprehension, in which the relationship signifier/signified has
been suspended. The empty embrace images the outer limit of desire that is
recognized but unsatisfied and unspoken.
The image of the empty embrace also figures the relationship of translation to
original text. In 'The Task of the Translator', after dismissing the notion that a
translation is 'meant for readers who do not understand the original', Benjamin
illustrates his idea that 'the task of the translator [is] to liberate the language
imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work' with a simile: 'Just as a
tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point [. . .] a translation touches
the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense' (p. 80).
Barbara Johnson discusses Benjamin's essay in relation to the text of Baudelaire
to which it was the introduction. Working back and forth between the German
text and the French poems, she reads the simile as though it translated love as
it disappears, as in Baudelaire's 'Passante' ('6 toi que j'eusse aimee! 0 toi qui
le savais'). 'Translation, confronting the difference between what is linguistic
and what is untranslatable, makes possible a glimpse of the mental being of
mankind that is not linguistic. But in that it is not linguistic, it is incapable of
being communicated.'23 Woolf cites the image of the empty embrace in 'On Not
Knowing Greek' and leaves it untranslated: 'The meaning is just on the far side
of language. It is the meaning which in moments of astonishing excitement and
stress we perceive in our minds without words' (p. 3 i). The image to which she
22
In Moments of Being, ed. by Jeanne Schulkind (New York and London: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1985), p. 91.
23 Mother
Tongues: Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2003), p. 57.
152 Virginia Woolf: Translation and 'Iterability'
devotes such attention is her trope of the boundary between a loss the subject
cannot express and its linguistic representation.
The signature of Woolf's prose is her constant gesture towards the 'far side
of language', especially in passages having to do with death and female desire.
For instance, in a well-known passage from Mrs. Dalloway the old woman at
the Tube station sings 'ee um fah um so I foo swee too eem oo', a song 'with
an absence of all human meaning'. The image takes us back 'through the age
of tusk and mammoth, through the age of silent sunrise' (p. 70). But far from
representing the untranslatable by an image of circle and tangent, Woolf gives
us a phylogenetic image of the yearning body, at a moment after the event but
prior to speech. Derrida writes with reference to Heidegger of 'the forgotten
thinking of the other language. We must translate ourselves into it and not
make it come into our language. It is necessary to go toward the unthought
thinking of the other language.'24 Woolf's sense of 'the unthought thinking' is
that it apprehends the desire of the body, at the moment before it is named in
language.
Benjamin's text also moves toward the visible/invisible: 'A real translation is
transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows
the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon
the original all the more fully' (p. 79). But whereas Benjamin assimilates his
discussion to the sacred writings of Scripture, in which God commands light,
Woolf's point of reference is her revision of the Platonic cave, with its emphasis
on emerging into light. In A Room of One's Own she images the world discovered
by the woman novelist Mary Carmichael as 'that vast chamber where nobody
has yet been. It is all half lights and profound shadows like those serpentine
caves where one goes with a candle peering up and down, not knowing where
one is stepping.' The image of shining a light concerns translation in the sense
of recording 'words that are hardly syllabled yet'; of crossing the boundary
between the untranslatable and the linguistic (pp. 76-77).

What happens when translation moves a citation into new territory, where
under changed conditions of utterance it creates the capacity of narrative to ask
new questions? I attempt to read certain acts of translation in Woolf's work in
terms of Derrida's critique of the theory of speech-acts in LIMITED INC. In a
longer study I would ask about their connection with history and ethics. Here,
without engaging all the details of his response to John R. Searle, I ask whether
translation and the refusal to translate in Woolf's work exhibit those qualities of
'iterability' that allow the Greek text to pose new questions. Whereas Woolf's
citations of Greek in her essays remain citations, in that they refer to Greek
history and tragedy, in her fiction the citation engenders a different context and
a different problematic.
The Years concerns three generations of Pargiters, whose family history is
counterpointed by the dates that constitute the titles of the chapters. In the final
chapter, 'Present Day', Edward quotes in Greek the line that Antigone addresses
to Creon after she has sprinkled dust on the corpse of her brother and been
24
The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference,Translation, trans. by Peggy Kamuf(Lincoln
and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), p. I 15.
 EMILY DALGARNO I53

apprehended: OViTOLaVVEXOEOV, aAa avubLAdEv 'iuvv ("Tis not my nature to join

in hating but in loving' (1. 523)).25 Creon responds: 'Pass, then, to the world
of the dead, and if thou must needs love, love them. While I live, no woman
shall rule me.' When Edward's nephew asks to have the line translated, Edward
refuses: "'It's the language," he said' (p. 393). To what does 'it' refer? Perhaps
to the sound of Greek. In 'On Not Knowing Greek' Woolf cites several lines
in Greek, leaving untranslated Cassandra's cry as she foresees Clytemnestra's
bloody murder. The frontier between, in Johnson's terms, the 'linguistic' and
the untranslatable represents in Woolf's essay inexpressibly intense emotion.
Perhaps the Cambridge Greek plays, which were performed and sung in Greek
during Woolf's life (as they still are), were a factor as well. Woolf attended
one performance in 1925, and her tutor, Janet Case, had once played Athena
in Eumenides.26 Since the essay constantly represents the plays as performed,
and refers to sentences that 'explode on striking the ear', it appears that Woolf
shared Edward's pleasure in the untranslatable sound of Greek (p. 31).
More importantly for this argument, Edward's quotation raises questions
about author and communication that create a new context. Derrida's term
'iterability', which he developed in response to the assumptions of Western
metaphysics implicit in theories of performative speech, helps to set Edward's
exchange with his nephew in a fresh critical context. 'Iterability' is 'the pos-
sibility for every mark to be repeated and still to function as a meaningful
mark in new contexts that are cut off entirely from the original context'.27 The
term derives from Descartes's De essentia rerum materialium; & iterum de Deo,
quod existat (=Meditation v (1641)), a work which considers the difficulties of
the name of God as sign.28 The terms associated with 'iterability' are counter-
intuitive: Derrida demonstrates that the idea of the unified single self, the
speaker's intentions, communication, and the receiver are untenable idealiza-
tions. Since 'the unconscious is absolutely excluded by the axiomatics [. . .] of
current speech-act theory', that theory fails to account for the 'fact [that] rather
few of one's intentions are ever brought to consciousness as intentions' (p. 74).
As a result the power of intention, which is central to performative speech, is
diminished, so that 'it will no longer govern the entire scene and system of
utterance' (p. 18). Iterability is not a structure that replaces another, but rather
a 'chain': 'not simply a term designating an object that is self-contained, struc-
tured in and of itself, but rather "itself" a mark, a divided and divisive part of a
movement that no one term can decisively determine'.29 Thus redefined, per-
formative utterance acquires new potentiality: 'if one admits that writing (and
the mark in general) must be able to function in the absence of the sender, the
receiver, the context of production, etc., that implies that this power, this being

25
The line is untranslated in The Years, p. 393, translated in Three Guineas, p. 303.
26 Pat
Easterling, 'The Early Years of the Cambridge Greek Play: I882-I912', in Classics in
rgth and 20th Century Cambridge: Curriculum, Culture and Community ed. by Christoper Stray
(Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1999), pp. 28-30.
27
J. Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 200I), p. 78.
28
LIMITED INC, trans. by Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (Glyph, 2 (1977)) (Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), pp. 82-83.
29
Samuel Weber, 'It', Glyph, 4 (1978), I-3I (p. 9).
I54 Virginia Woolf: Translation and 'Iterability'
able, this possibility is always inscribed, hence necessarily inscribed as possibility
in the functioning or the functional structure of the mark' (p. 48).
Woolf's terms are similar. In the early story 'The Mark on the Wall' (1917),
no act of understanding can exhaust the potentiality of the mark. The narrator
denies it the contexts of history, knowledge, or Nature, until at the end of
the story its potentiality is foreclosed by a casual utterance: it is a snail. The
speech-act is unmotivated in comparison with the rich potentiality accrued to
the mark by the unspoken narrative. The mark is the object of thought but
not of comprehension, at least until the arbitrary assignment of the sign: 'once
a thing's done, no one ever knows how it happened'.3? In addition, Woolf
was always uneasy about inscribing personal identity, the '"I" [that is] only a
convenient term for somebody who has no real being'.3' Other terms are clarified
in Orlando (1928). In the passage where Orlando changes selves, the narrator
remarks that 'the conscious self, which is the uppermost, and has the power to
desire, wishes to be nothing but one self. This is what some people call the true
self.'32 A few pages later the narrator notes the fundamental contradiction in
the act of communication, since 'when communication is established they [the
selves] fall silent' (p. 205).
The capacity of the mark to dissociate itself from sender, receiver, and context
has implications for translation. The narrative of The Years shows how the text
of Antigone, once it has been translated, seems in Derrida's terms to 'break
with its context' as a play of the fifth century BC, and to participate in a chain
of events that shifts its meaning. In the chapter 'I88o' Edward prepares a
translation that he hopes will qualify him for entrance into the university and
thus assure him a place in the lineage of his father and grandfather, who had both
studied there. Stimulated by a glass of port, he imagines his cousin Kitty, who
'lived, laughed and breathed' as Antigone (p. 50). Here translation transacts
'the difference between signified and signifier' in Edward's mind in a way that
re-creates the dead Antigone as a female phantom. His translation, which is
eventually published, is read in the chapter 'I907' by his cousin Sara, as she
lies in bed dreaming of love. Face to face with Edward's text, she unconsciously
mimics the position of the dead Antigone, thus enacting Edward's image of
the phantom. In 'Present Day' Antigone's speech becomes the occasion of a
rebuff, when Edward, now a don, refuses to translate it for his cousin, who has
returned from farming in Africa. Edward's recitation of the line in Greek, by
maintaining the border between university men and all others, in effect creates
the colonized subject. Antigone's line has shed its Greek context, and serves
instead, like the chapter headings, as part of the novel's critique of chronological
narrative.
In The Years 'iterability' functions in the absence both of 'the empirically
determined receiver', and the 'empirically determined subject'.33 Edward's per-
formance is not linked to personal agency, but rather manifests the linguistic
30 The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, ed. by Susan Dick (New York and London:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), pp. 77-83 (p. 78).
3' A Room of One's Own, p. 4.
32 Orlando: A Biography (London: Hogarth, 1990), p. 202.
33 LIMITED
INC, pp. 8-9.
 EMILY DALGARNO I55

censorship maintained by the university. Nevertheless, he successfully blocks

the potential receiver. Antigone's line is not a citation even for Edward, who,
devoted as he is to accuracy, shows himself blind to its dramatic and historical
context. Whereas the untranslated passages in 'On Not Knowing Greek' have
the effect of creating an impasse between the cry of joy or fear and the sign, in
the novel the untranslated passage defines the general space of potentiality of
the iterable mark. Edward's refusal cannot halt the chain of circumstances in
which the line eludes the control of the poet and his translator as it creates for
itself new historical contexts.
In the I930s Woolf returned to Antigone in a discussion of the difference
between the laws of 'civilized people' and those 'laid down by "god"'. In a
strange passage of Three Guineas about the authority of the father, she writes
of 'the black night that now covers Europe, and with no language but a cry, Ay,
ay, ay, ay ... But it is not a new cry, it is a very old cry [.. .] We are in Greece
now', where Creon has shut Antigone 'not in Holloway or in a concentration
camp, but in a tomb' (p. 269). When Creon condemns to death the woman who
seeks justice from the laws of god, he has become our contemporary. Woolf's
translation has created an Antigone that, while retaining its dramatic impact,
appeals to a community of readers living in the Europe of 1938. Moreover, the
cry 'makes us say what we have not said'. The repetition of the cry recalls the
cry of Cassandra in Agamemnon when she is possessed by Apollo, as well as
Woolf's own experience of language during mental illness. As translator she
would seem to be haunted by a text that re-creates her experience of the way
that crisis motivates utterance. Derrida argues that the translator is fascinated
by the intangible, 'that which remains of the text when one has extracted from
it the communicable meaning [.. .] when one has transmitted that which can
be transmitted'.34 When Woolf has extracted from the text the image of the
dictator, does the cry represent the untranslatable 'far side of meaning'? Has
the cry, like the mark, become the object of thought but not of comprehension?
Translation can invent the future in Derrida's discussion of Cicero's Parti-
tiones oratoriae in Psyche. The scene at the start of the work, in which Cicero's
son asks his father, if he is so inclined, to translate a passage on rhetoric from
Greek into Latin is, he writes, 'a scene of traditio as tradition, transfer, and
translation': "'Studeo, mi pater, Latine ex te audire ea quae mihi tu de ra-
tione dicendi Graece tradidisti, si modo tibi est otium et si vis": "I am burning
with a desire, father, to hear you say to me in Latin those things concerning
the doctrine of speaking that you have given [dispensed, reported, delivered
or translated, bequeathed] to me in Greek, at least if you have the time and
want to do it"'.35 Derrida's essay weaves together his interest in metaphor, his
relationship to the late Paul deMan, and a reading of a French poem, with
issues of patent and copyright. I focus on his imagination of the scene be-
tween father and son in Partitiones as the 'inaugural event' when translation
marks the invention of the future: 'Who finds himself or herself excluded from
34 'Des Tours de Babel', pp. 191-92.
35 Psyche: inventions de l'autre (Paris: Galilee, 1987), p. I2, trans. by Catherine Porter, in Acts of
Literature, ed. by Derek Attridge (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 3I2-I8 (p. 312);
page references below are to Porter's translation.
156 Virginia Woolf: Translation and 'Iterability'

this scene of invention? What other of invention? Father, son, daughter, wife,
brother or sister? If invention is never private, what then is its relation with
all the family dramas?' (p. 3 6). Derrida's position is marked by his identity as
an Algerian who speaks two French languages, yet his education in a French
university apparently assimilated him to the position of heir: he reads the pas-
sage 'as if the heir were the sole judge [. . .] as if the son's countersignature
bore the legitimating authority' (p. 315). Woolf, writing from a position as a
female in imperial Britain, famously refused her signature in Three Guineas.
In The Years Edward, who is a son, excludes other affiliations, at a gathering
that both includes family members and excludes foreigners. Those who take
from the shelf books in foreign languages return them unread, and the Polish
visitor who attempts to toast the human race-'may it grow to maturity'-is
constantly interrupted. Yet the sentence begun by the foreigner and completed
by Eleanor, the oldest sibling who is somewhat distanced from the family, may
represent the speech-act that produces something new. Woolf envisions a future
in the hands not of an heir but of a group of different generations, sexualities,
and nationalities whose need for community creates a common syntax.
Near the end of her life Woolf showed that a world bereft of iterability suffers
an impoverished sense of the past. In an interval between scenes of the pageant
of English history that is performed in Between the Acts (1941), the actors sing
of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, who have become mere names. 'Only a few
great names-Babylon, Nineveh, Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, Troy-floated
across the open space. Then the wind rose, and in the rustle of the leaves even
the great words became inaudible; and the audience sat staring at the villagers,
whose mouths opened, but no sound came.'36 In the absence of the iterable
translation history has turned into prehistory. When the voices are no longer
heard, even the names disappear. That says a mouthful.
36 (London: Hogarth Press, I990), p. 87.