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CULTURAL TRANSLATIONS: A COMPARATIVE CRITICAL STUDY OF KATE ROBERTS AND VIRGINIA WOOLF FRANCESCA RHYDDERCH A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF PhD UNIVERSITY OF WALES, ABERYSTWYTH 2000 DECLARATION This work has not previously been accepted in substance for any degree and is not being concurrently submitted in candidature for any degree. 4" Signed....... (candidate) ................................................. z3... Zz1j0 Date x1i. .......... ......................................................................... STATEMENT 1 This thesis is the result of my own investigations, except where otherwise stated. Other sources are acknowledged by footnotes giving explicit references. A bibliography is appended. Signed (candidate) ......... ' .................................................... ..... 3.. MRS Date X11.. U............................................................................. ............... , STATEMENT 2 I hereby give consent for my thesis, if accepted, to be available for photocopying and for inter-library loan, and for the title and summary to be made available to outside organisations. hL" Signed............ (candidate) .............................................. 3Ü......................................................................... Date.?. ' CULTURAL TRANSLATIONS: A COMPARATIVE CRITICAL STUDY OF KATE ROBERTS AND VIRGINIA WOOLF FRANCESCA RHYDDERCH Abstract This thesis offers a comparative critical study of Virginia Woolf and her lesser known contemporary, the Welsh author Kate Roberts. To the majority of readers in the `English-speaking world', the name of one of these writers is so familiar that it may be considered a literary touchstone, while that of the other is still almost entirely unknown. Written from the perspective of a minority culture, this thesis traces the faultlines-that is, previously unexplored sites of tension-within the respective cultural identities of the writers under discussion. Scrutinising such faultlines helps to illuminate the more paradoxical aspects of the work of both Roberts and Woolf. For example, a focus on Roberts's cultural positioning forces a significant reassessment of Woolf's relationship with English literary traditions and a more informed consideration of her attitude towards the British Empire. Conversely, the large body of criticism on the gendered aspects of Woolf's writing provides a highly relevant framework within which to explore the hitherto neglected sexual politics of Roberts's work, together with the ways in which her identity as a woman intersects with, and in fact conflicts with, her cultural identity. Drawing upon Frederic Jameson's notion of genre as a social institution, I explore the generic forms deployed by Woolf and Roberts in terms of their cultural specificity. The question of genre can in fact be seen as a crucial aspect of the issues discussed in this thesis-cultural positioning, gender and writing, aesthetics and politics. In this study I examine the output of Roberts and Woolf in five different genresautobiography, short stories, the war novel, drama and journalism. In each case such questions-of community and audience, literary tradition, gendered engagements with that tradition, and the forging of a self-conscious cultural aesthetics-are uppermost. CONTENTS Acknowledgements i ................................................... Note translations ii on .................................................. Introduction Cultural translation ................................................... Chapter 1 A the the 19 portrait of artist as a young girl: autobiographies ... Chapter 2 Negotiations tradition: the fiction 57 with short .................... Chapter 3 `What "really" happened to Evans': the war novels.......... 107 Chapter 4 'O'r tu 61i'r llen' [From behind the curtain]: the plays...... 152 Chapter 5 Writing democracy: the journalism 203 .............................. Conclusion Survival 244 .............................................................. Bibliography 250 ....................................................... ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I should like to thank my supervisor Professor Jane Aaron for her careful and dedicated supervision. I am also grateful to friends and colleagues for their valuable comments, especially Cathryn Charnell-White, Sarah Prescott, Damian Walford Davies, Jason Walford Davies and Nia Williams. My thanks go also to the University of Wales and the British Academy for funding this project. 11 NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS Where possible, I have used published translations of Welsh texts, and sources are indicated accordingly. Elsewhere, I have provided my own translations, in which case the source is cited in Welsh and no translator credited. INTRODUCTION Cultural translation Mae caeau i mi yr un fath ä phobl. No one perhaps has ever felt Mae rhai a adwaen yn dda a rhai nas passionately towards a lead pencil. But adwaen o gwbl. A meddwl am gaeau there are circumstances in which it can yn gyffredinol nid oes imi ddim become supremely desirable to possess diddordeb ynddynt, and y mae caeau y one; moments when we are set upon bydd yn eu gweled fel gweled hen having an object, an excuse for ffrindiau na welais mohonynt ers walking half across London between blynyddoedd. Mae gan y caeau a tea and dinner. As the foxhunter hunts adwaen bob un ei bersonoliaeth, ac fel in order to preserve the breed of foxes, popeth a chanddo bersonoliaeth mae and the golfer plays in order that open iddynt enwau. Dyma hwy: Cae Cefn spaces may be preserved from the Ty, Cae Bach, Cae 'Flaen Drws, Y builders, so when the desire comes Weirglodd, Cae Hetar, Cae upon us to go street rambling the pencil Pennabyliaid. Nid oes angen dywedyd does for a pretext, and getting up we `ac yn y blaen', oblegid nid oes ragor. say: `Really I must buy a pencil, ' as if Dim and imi gau fy llygaid, a gwelaf under cover of this excuse we could bob congl o'r caeau hynny ar wahanol indulge safely in the greatest pleasure adegau o'r flwyddyn. of town life in winter-rambling the streets of London. Kate Roberts, `Caeau' [Fields], 1928 (for translation see footnotes) Virginia Woolf, `Street Haunting: A London Adventure', 1930 Kate Roberts's `Caeau' [Fields] and Virginia Woolfs `Street Haunting' were written just two years apart, by two British women writers who were born ' within a decade of each other. And yet, to the majority of readers in the `English-speaking world', the name of one of these writers is so familiar that it may be considered a literary touchstone, while that of the other is still almost entirely unknown. An author who wrote solely in her mother tongue, a language spoken today by some 800,000 of the Welsh population, Kate Roberts's work remains invisible to many, despite the fact that within her own 'Kate Roberts (1891-1985), `Caeau' [Fields] (1928), reprinted in Erthyglau ac Ysgrifau Llenyddol Kate Roberts [Articles and Literary Essays by Kate Roberts], ed. David Jenkins (Swansea: Gwasg Christopher Davies, 1978), p. 27. Translation: `Fields are to me the same as people. There are some I know well and some I don't know at all. And considering fields in general they hold no interest for me, but seeing certain fields is like seeing old friends whom I haven't seen for years. Each field that I know has its own personality, and like everything that has a personality, they have names. They are: Cae Cefn Ty, Cae Bach, Cae 'Flaen Drws, Y Weirglodd, Cae Hetar, Cae Pennabyliaid. There is no need to say `and so on', since there are no more. I have only to close my eyes and I see every corner of those fields at different times of the year. ' Virginia Woolf, (1882-1941), `Street Haunting: A London Adventure' (1930), The Death of the Moth and other essays (London: The Hogarth Press, 1942), p. 19. 2 culture she holds an iconic status comparable to that of Virginia Woolf in the anglophone Western world. To set them side by side, Kate Roberts and Virginia Woolf, `Caeau' and `Street Haunting', the Welsh and English languages and cultures, is to give voice to such disharmonies. To become attuned to such dissonance is to embark upon the complex process that is cultural translation. `Caeau', a short, autobiographical piece published in Y Llenor in 1928, when Roberts was thirty-seven [.. ], is an `essay' in more than one sense. Although by the time it was written, she was making her name as a short story writer, Roberts was still a relatively new literary figure, and her uncertainty about this piece--she wrote to her friend and mentor Saunders Lewis, for example, that `sometimes I think that it is very good and at others that it is babyishly bad'-reflects her sense of vulnerability about her standing as an 2 author. However, it is also one of the more interesting and telling of her earlier pieces, in that Roberts can be seen here trying her hand at a different form, and testing her developing technique as a writer. She writes in the personal, meditative register with which she was experimenting in her political journalism at that time, and to which she would return much later in her autobiography, published in 1960. `Caeau' is a piece which, although it represents a generic departure from the short stories and novels which Roberts wrote during the 1920s, nevertheless bears early traces of many of what were later acknowledged as hallmarks of her work. The clearest examples of these are her nostalgic evocation of her native `square mile' and an emphasis on the simple, honest lifestyle and values of the gwerin, rural working-class tradition in which she was raised.

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