Collected Works Woolf, Virginia: Complete Works | v.11.1 | Update 6 Feb 2024

[fantasyfan]

Thank You so much for doing such a marvellous job!

[pynch]

A major revision: when I first worked on this edition, I could only use the online scans of Woolf’s early books. I now borrowed 13 more of them from a library, corrected the formatting, and restored (about 800) missing italics. The illustrations of Flush and Orlando have been repositioned, those of Three Guineas and the footnotes for Granite and Rainbow are now included. One of the more surprising discoveries was that, in the essay “The Lives of the Obscure”, the third section “Miss Ormerod”, which was only published in the American edition of The Common Reader, was missing. I have transcribed the text and put it back in. Also, I have read Between the Acts and A Room of One’s Own and corrected a bunch of scanning mistakes.

Corrections of the 6 books that are still unchecked will follow in a future update.

There’s a lot of happiness to be found in improving digital Woolf.

Anyone interested in her letters?

[doubleshuffle]

Originally Posted by pynch

Anyone interested in her letters?

Naah, can't imagine anyone wanting those....

[jgaiser]

Dude... You've got *way* too much time on your hands... ;-)

Thanks for all the amazing ebooks.

[Prestidigitweeze]

He hasn't got nearly enough time on his hind, since he's the only person who seems to be creating collections on this level.

Frankly, I'd love to have the letters in electronic form -- everyone would, I think. Even superficial vultures would dwell on the ones she wrote at the end.

And thanks for including the new text. It's been ages since I read The Common Reader series, but I think I'd have noticed the omission if I reread that essay. Either that, or I'd have trudged around my apartment afterward, distracted from doing menial chores by the nebulous feeling that something was off.

[pynch]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

He hasn't got nearly enough time on his hind, since he's the only person who seems to be creating collections on this level.

Frankly, I'd love to have the letters in electronic form -- everyone would, I think. Even superficial vultures would dwell on the ones she wrote at the end.

And thanks for including the new text. It's been ages since I read The Common Reader series, but I think I'd have noticed the omission if I reread that essay. Either that, or I'd have trudged around my apartment afterward, distracted from doing menial chores by the nebulous feeling that something was off.

I hope nobody else tried to read The Common Reader, the missing formatting for the quotes—which often come without quotation marks—made the text hard to understand in places.

——

So we have 3 yea votes (2 of which reached me privately), 0 nay votes and 1 naah vote for the letters. It seems like I’ll have a glorious winter reading Woolf while you all have to go to work, do the dishes, etc. …

Not sure whether I will be able or willing to do them all, though, those volumes have about 3,000 pages.

[anacreon]

Originally Posted by pynch

Anyone interested in her letters?

Yes, Yes, Yes! I'm still reading her diaries, on an off, piecemeal, and it becomes more and more fascinating as I advance, and I so wish I could have her letters in parallel! Unfortunately it is not available in digital format.

For those reading German, the Handke - Unseld Briefwechsel is another look into being a writer / a publisher, which I also found fascinating.

Many thanks again.

[doubleshuffle]

Well, seems I'm in luck, what with my naah vote being taken all seriously and stuff...

[medard]

I'd like to have Woolf's letters in my digital collection, too.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by anacreon

For those reading German, the Handke - Unseld Briefwechsel is another look into being a writer / a publisher, which I also found fascinating.

I only wish I could read Handke in German! Kathy Acker and I used to talk about Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied in particular -- since she was obsessed with her sadistic moth (my pet word for mother) -- but both of us went through a phase of reading everything we could by Handke. Though Weaver, Manheim and others seemed to do basic justice to the style, we presumed they also distorted what Mr. H. had to say (and halved the felicitous centaurs of his language). V. Woolf mentions somewhere that the experience of reading Russian fiction in translation is like peering through someone else's prescription lenses.

(BTW: There's a rather creepy discussion about translating Handke here.)

Dani Cavallaro has written insightfully about a poem of mine (cf. pp. 73-4) which contains the phrase our symphonies are insect seas -- her comments are in English and conceal no secret poetry behind the Kabbalistic shells of translation -- as did Prof. Tatiana Rapatzikou (pp. 155-170), whose original essay is in Greek. I can barely parse that language and have no idea how my formulation works in her version, but in someone else's Turkish translation of that same poem, insect seas becomes rovartengerek. In German, insect seas is translated as one word as well.

I used to live with a translator from Bavaria by way of Los Angeles and was intoxicated by the balletic German formulations she seemed to extract from the most pedestrian American prose. She was also in the process of translating Unica Zürn (whom people used to say she resembled) into English.

Zürn's diaristic correspondence (by which I mean her novels) is intricately inspiring as well, isn't it, anacreon? And I so wish that Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann's correspondence were available as an ebook in English translation -- this translation, as it happens.

An American writer friend who now lives in Berlin once asked a German writer whether fischfrau would be the correct translation of mermaid. The German writer chortled immoderately, explaining that a fischfrau would be the result of a human male fornicating with a fish. Apparently, an obscene picture was somehow attached to the epithet.

I envy that gentleman his familiarity with the nuances of the portmanteau.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Strange -- removing a redundant N from Manheim seems to have triggered a login request and then a double post. That's what I get for falling in love with a twin (and therefore the idea of twins).

[pynch]

“Whats the use, if a book is fundamentally unreadable, like the Waves, of correcting commas?” (Letter to Ethel Smyth, 12 July 1931)

I have added two volumes of her letters: A Change of Perspective [Vol. III: 1923-1928] and A Reflection of the Other Person [Vol. IV: 1929-1931]. I also checked and corrected the formatting and italics of 4 more books and added the text passages in Moments of Being which were discovered later and published in the second edition.

Btw: Today is Joyce’ 132th birthday. Let’s drink to that.

[doubleshuffle]

Great. Thanks again!

[Copa]

Wow, thank you so much, I'm forever grateful to you for this amazing work, pynch!!
I wanted though to ask, will you be adding the rest of the volumes with her letters? I hope you will..

Again, thank you!

[pynch]

Welcome to MobileRead, Copa, and I’m glad you like them.

Yes, the other volumes of letters will follow, but I needed a little break because they are quite difficult to transcribe.