{"id":2751,"date":"2020-03-23T14:16:51","date_gmt":"2020-03-23T13:16:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/wordpress_test\/?p=2751"},"modified":"2023-08-13T11:34:38","modified_gmt":"2023-08-13T09:34:38","slug":"reading-woolf-hearing-dante","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/?p=2751","title":{"rendered":"Reading Woolf & Hearing Dante"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Writing up my thoughts as I reread Virginia Woolf’s diaries<\/a>, I turned for a browse back to Night & Day<\/em> (1919), and I was overcome in some segments with the rhythm of Dante. Perhaps I am imagining it, but take the time here to experiment a little anyway – beneath are a couple of excerpts (a Kindle version) that I have broken up (rather willy-nilly!) in tercets ending with a quatrain as with some English translations of The Divine Comedy<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was no reason, she assured herself,
for this feeling of happiness;
she was not free; she was not alone;

she was still bound to earth
by a million fibres; 
every step took her nearer home.

Nevertheless, she exulted
as she had never exulted before.
The air was fresher, the lights more distinct,

the cold stone of the balustrade
colder and harder,
when by chance or purpose

she struck her hand against it.
No feeling of annoyance with Denham remained;
he certainly did not hinder any flight

she might choose to make,
whether in the direction of the sky
or of her home; 

but that her condition was due to him,
or to anything
that he had said,
she had no consciousness at all.

Virginia Woolf. Night and Day Ch.XXIII (Kindle Locations 4335-4339). <\/pre>\n\n\n\n
He walked on upon the impetus
of this last mood
of almost supernatural exaltation 

until he reached a narrow street,
at this hour empty
of traffic and passengers.

Here, whether it was the shops
with their shuttered windows, 
the smooth and silvered curve 

of the wood pavement,
or a natural ebb of feeling,
his exaltation slowly oozed
and deserted him.

Virginia Woolf. Night and Day Ch.XXIII(Kindle Locations 4362-4364). <\/pre>\n\n\n\n
How they came to find themselves
walking down a street with many lamps,
corners radiant with light, 

and a steady succession of motor-omnibuses
plying both ways along it, 
they could neither of them tell;

nor account for the impulse which led them 
suddenly to select one of these wayfarers 
and mount to the very front seat.

After curving through streets
of comparative darkness, 
so narrow that shadows on the blinds

were pressed within a few feet of their faces,
they came to one of those great knots of activity
where the lights, having drawn close together, 

thin out again and take their separate ways.
They were borne on 
until they saw the spires of the city churches
pale and flat against the sky.

Virginia Woolf. Night and Day Ch.XXXIV (Kindle Locations 7346-7351). <\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps it is just this “stream of consciousness” flowing from Katherine  & Ralph respectively, in which inner-contemplation is interwoven with the descriptive place as they wander through Kew Gardens or then together walking in the City at the end of the novel, when what is settled is clearly not, that causes me to wonder at this. But I seem to remember Dante was important to Woolf, and to the familial and social milieu of her Victorian youth, and coincidentally at the end of 1918 she is alerted to Tom Eliot’s allusions to Dante<\/a>, and this at a time she was struggling with her revision of Night & Day<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Well, I meant to just browse, but in the end I read it through. Perhaps I agree with Katherine Mansfield’s insinuation<\/a> (as VW interpreted her criticism anyway) that it was not a break-out work but rather a throw back – old-fashioned in other words! But with a century in-between and the luxury of being able to appreciate Woolf’s work in its entirety, I very much see Night & Day<\/em> as Woolf’s bridge into the moderne. And the irritations that plagued her with regard to this book, and they were numerous, may well have resulted from an awareness of its failings; only a bridge when she could have been braver and taken an enormous leap like some of her contemporaries, including Mansfield. But I like the way she took, I like how her life intruded into her story – romance and friendship and not quite m\u00e9nage \u00e0 troi<\/em>s, the serious and shallow of both sexes and the occupations they chose, urban living and rural retreats, patriarchal legacies and generational conflicts.  Very few lives change radically from one day to the next, so why should the writing of?  And stylistically, the omniscient voice, whilst presented formally, has a way of “wandering” that suggests the more fragmented narratives to come (and a life’s journey, divine too in its way.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Writing up my thoughts as I reread Virginia Woolf’s diaries, I turned for a browse back to Night & Day (1919), and I was overcome in some segments with the rhythm of Dante. Perhaps I am imagining it, but take the time here to experiment a little anyway – beneath are a couple of excerpts … Continue reading “Reading Woolf & Hearing Dante”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[22],"tags":[53,100],"class_list":["post-2751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-virginia-woolf","tag-dante","tag-night-day"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2751"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2751\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16491,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2751\/revisions\/16491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}