Abstract
I translated into French Virginia Woolf’s penultimate novel, The Waves, and have no regrets since ten months’ work was rewarded by a visit to Bloomsbury and two brief hours with a dazzling yet shy woman who received me in a dusk-filled room.1 One is always wrong about the writers of one’s own time, either over-estimating or denigrating them. However, I don’t believe myself wrong in placing Virginia Woolf among the four or five great virtuosi of the English language and among the few contemporary novelists whose work has a chance of lasting more than ten years. And, despite many signs to the contrary, I hope that in 2500 there will still be sensibilities fine enough to appreciate the subtleties of her art.
‘Une femme étincelante et timide’, Adam International Review, nos 364–6 (1972) pp. 16–17. Translated by J. H. Stape and Raymond Gauthier.
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© 1995 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Yourcenar, M. (1995). ‘A dazzling yet shy woman’. In: Stape, J.H. (eds) Virginia Woolf. Macmillan Interviews and Recollections. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23807-1_32
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