Translation as Collaboration: Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and S.S. Koteliansky, by Claire Davison

Claire Davison’s magisterial new book turns the spotlight on the co-translations with S.S. Koteliansky of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. Five chapters interrogate their individual conceptions of translation: their translating voices used as a form of enactment; how angles of perception are rendered, picking up on examples of impersonation and mimicry; how, in the translation process, they also become co-authors; and finally how the role of translating can be viewed within the context of early-twentieth century life-writing, a facet of their work ‘to which all three co-translators were particularly sensitive’.