A Sketch of the Past

by Virginia Woolf

Minningabrot eins fremsta rithöfundar 20. aldarinnar, Virginiu Woolf, sem hér birtast eru vitnisburður um hvernig endurtekin högg dauðans, kynferðisbrot og önnur áföll í bernsku mörkuðu persónuleika hennar fyrir lífstíð.
Soffía Auður Birgisdóttir þýðir af vandvirkni og ritar einnig ítarlegan eftirmála.

Sumir rithöfundar eru jafn þekktir fyrir litríkt lífshlaup sitt og skáldverkin. Virginia Woolf er ein þeirra en hún var jafnframt einn fremsti rithöfundur 20. aldarinnar. Hún dregur upp blæbrigðaríka mynd af íhaldssömu samfélagi Viktoríutímans í Bretlandi og lýsir foreldrum sínum af djúpum skilningi um leið og hún sýnir átök kynslóða á miklum umbreytingatímum. Þessi bersögla sjálfsævisaga sýnir jafnframt hvernig hún vefur þráðum úr eigin lífsreynslu saman við söguþræði skáldverka sinna.
Soffía Auður Birgisdóttir var tilnefnd til þýðingaverðlauna fyrir Orlandó eftir Virginiu Woolf. Hér þýðir hún aftur skrif þessa merka rithöfundar af sömu vandvirkni og ritar ítarlegan eftirmála.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

(Adeline) Virginia Woolf was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.

During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

Reviews

[Izzy]

i have..... complicated feelings towards this book. essentially, VW started to write a memoir, and then didn't finish it. It was published posthumously (post-suicide) by her husband.
there are moments which are beautiful, illuminating, clarifiying, witty, and urbane. there are also moments that are very, very, very dark. (hint: there should be a SA trigger warning, and no Hannah did not mention this to us) It's also very unpolished, so it lacks the specificity and care that you feel when you read other Woolf works.

I think I would recommend it if you wanted a really clear insight into Woolf's childhood (be warned - very depressing) or the way that Edwardian/late Victorian society treated women (be warned - VERY depressing), or even just to read some more Woolf thoughts on writing and reading and life in general. I don't know. I think it was interesting; I'm really glad I read it; I wouldn't recommend it to everyone.

Favourite quotes:
'If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills -- then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory.'
about realising people are connected: 'it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making a scene come right; making a character come together.'
'I feel that by writing I am doing what is far more necessary than anything else.'
On her childhood: 'A great hall I could liken it to; with windows letting in strange lights; and murmurs and spaces of deep silence. But somehow into that picture must be brought, too, the sense of movement and change. Nothing remained stable long. One must get the feeling of everything approaching and then disappearing, getting large, getting small, passing at different rates past the little creature...'
'I opened it and began to read some poem. And instantly and for the first time I understood the poem. It was as if it became altogether intelligible; I had a feeling of transparency in words when they cease to be words and become so intensified that one seems to experience them; to fortell them as if they developed what one is already feeling.'
'The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river.'

[Krista Toovey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Woolf’s metaficitonal memoir was unpublished in her lifetime and reads more like an unfinished draft. It was plucked out of her private writing and published by her husband.

It reads like the most thoughtful and profound diary entry ever written - a treatise on the moments that our memory holds onto as the moments that bring us into being, the formulate our identity.

If we remembered different events, would we be completely different people?

Woolf likens the events to pieces of cotton wool that we can hold up to the light and see ourselves through.

She then moves through a whole series of these moments of being for her - some joyful, some very dark and helpful in understanding who Woolf was.

Her exposed vulnerability in this confessional work is clear. Would she have wanted it published, I’m not sure, but despite that, we are so lucky to have access to the meandering thoughts of one of the greats.

[Jay Mathias · Rating 4 out of 5]

Woolf so greatly impresses me

This is a touching piece of memoir which carries both philosophical and deep emotional significance

The ending reminds me of Isak Dinesen’s daguerreotypes a bit , in the best ways

Perhaps I will read her other autobiographical work if I have the time

[marine ♡ · Rating 4 out of 5]

First time reading Woolf, loved it, will definitely read more of her
But I still don't like autobiographical/biographical writing

edit, second reading: I love that book, it represents everything that I love in literature, and every reasons why writers still write today

[Elisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-read this, again, for a recent Zoom gathering of Woolf scholars. This is the work that re-ingnited my interest in Virginia Woolf after a cursory introduction in college. The first few pages are some of the most breath-taking prose I have ever read. The correlation of Woolf's imagery with that of Georgia O'Keeffe is what inspired my first foray into the annual Virginia Woolf conferences in 1993 and set the stage for nearly thirty years of subsequent research.

[Árni Freyr · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pú. Það er eins og hún leggi sig fram við að vera lítið relatable. Engin bygging, engin framvinda, ekkert narratíf. Og svo ótrúlega erfitt að hafa samúð með svona forréttindafólki sem er svona mikið forréttindafólk en áttar sig ekki baun á öllum forréttindunum sínum.

[Chiara · Rating 4 out of 5]

bin dabei eingeschlafen, aber der schlaf war sehr erholsam 😌😌😌😌

[Daniel Joseph]

I have read this over the course of a few months without the due intensity of attention, which exacerbated by its rough draft nature necessities that I have not appreciated it as I ought, nor have I formulated a response to it as I should.

The first problem of autobiography, as Woolf herein herself notes, is that it is so easy to capture the events which happened to a person we lose sight of the person they happened to, who recedes from the page and the reader's cognition. I cannot say -- perhaps if I read this again more closely -- that I now know Woolf in any real way, or if one can even know a person through even their autobiography. In this sense I would have to characterize her foray here as a failure. Nonetheless some important aspects of her personality, of her upbringing, of her family are preserved and these interest me very much.

It was not so long ago that families engaged in life together. Woolf talks about, after the death of her mother and then that of her sister Stella, how her brother George insisted upon introducing them to Society which has for a little while no longer existed in any real form but vague and half-witted attempts or stumblings at performing something no one quite remembers. The Stephen family is shown to be given over to scholarship since the time of childhood, to receive guests in philosophy and other letters (though Woolf derides her father as a Victorian and never invited younger thinkers). Of course, from her description, I don't think I would have liked to be a Stephen.

[ND · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deep insights into Woolf's early life, including the joys of childhood, on the one hand, and the sexual abuse she suffered from her half-siblings, along with the emotional difficulties of living with her impossible, enraged father. It's easy to understand why she sought freedom in Bloomsbury, and an escape from the horrors of her Victorian childhood.

[Benedikt Traustason]

Tengdi frekar lítið við þessi minningarbrot og þurfti að herða mig í gegnum upphafið. Rann betur eftir því sem leið á. Áhugaverðar pælingar um ævisögur almennt, hvað segja þær yfir höfuð?

VW var mjög áhugaverð persóna en það kemst ekki til skila hér.

[Stan Stott]

Wait that was so good. First Woolf I’ve ever properly enjoyed… “she had her own sorrow waiting behind her to dip into privately”.

[Jola Cora · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful

[Chiara · Rating 5 out of 5]

MOTHERRRRRRRRRR THISTHISTHIS

[j k · Rating 5 out of 5]

"There were so many different worlds: but they were distant from me. I could not make them cohere; nor feel myself in touch with them."

[TopBob · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW!!

[Luise · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Bezieht sich auf das Hörbuch):
Sophie Rois kann weiterhin die engl. "dsch"-Laute nicht aussprechen und sagt Virtschinia und Tschames, interpretiert den Text ansonsten durchaus überzeugend, wenn auch eigenwillig.

[NJ · Rating 3 out of 5]

this was my first experience of the life-writing genre or even reading Woolf's work. her categorisation of moments of 'being' and 'non-being' was a very interesting approach and I enjoyed her style of writing, even if it was a little protracted.

[readingmom_switzerland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sehr interessant!

[Aaron Goldman · Rating 4 out of 5]

First experience with Virginia Woolf. This is filled with beautiful prose, and she depicts an intriguing life. Not my cup of tea, but gorgeous.