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This workshop will offer a hands-on introduction to a collection of translations of writings by Virginia Woolf owned by the University of Sussex Library. The collection includes translations from the 1920s to the 1970s and beyond in Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbo-Croation, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Macedonian. In this Centre for Modernist Studies workshop, led by Elisa Bolchi and Helen Tyson, we will look at this fascinating collection as testimony to Woolf’s global reach, and think about the diverse forms her translated texts have taken. Elisa Bolchi will introduce us to the Italian translations of Woolf and share insights from her research into Virginia Woolf’s Italian readers. No expertise is required – this workshop is open to all students and staff, and will involve an opportunity to explore a little-known archive of one of the twentieth-century’s most iconic authors.
Elisa Bolchi is Associate Professor in English Literature at the University of Ferrara. She is founding member of the Italian Virginia Woolf Society and she has worked and published extensively on the Italian reception of Woolf. She is lead editor of the Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and Transnational Perspectives (EUP, 2025), and she is now writing the monograph Virginia Woolf and Italian Readers for Palgrave Macmillan. In addition to reception studies, her research interests concern sociology of translation, rewriting and adaptation studies, archival studies, but also ecocriticism and literary ecology, with a focus on climate crisis. She is coordinator of the interdisciplinary PhD programme in Environmental Sustainability and Wellbeing at the University of Ferrara and a member of the National PhD Programme in Sustainable Development and Climate Change.