On Affectively Translating Virginia Woolf’s Diary

Abstract

Although 20th-century scientific discourse disregarded affect as unscientific, and despite this being contested by thinkers such as Nietzsche and Spinoza, only recently could we scientifically argue that affect is inseparable from cognition and building knowledge. This article aims at analyzing how my own practices were embodied and mediated by affect when translating into Brazilian Portuguese the diary of Virginia Woolf. I embarked on it as part of my doctoral research with a concept of “impartiality” in translation that was undermined when I was faced with the diary’s manuscripts. Positioning myself was inescapable after encountering a text I had only known in print and in an impersonal form; a body of work theoretically of private nature, written along 44 years, with its gaps, blots, and oscillating handwriting. This article has the double aim of contributing to studies on translation and affect reflecting on possible ways of using Derrida’s undecidability as a translational strategy, using as an illustration my own process of translating Woolf’s diary, while also helping to reflect on how the affect theory may expand previous considerations made by Woolf herself and other thinkers such as L. Zimmermann, G. Spivak, and H. de Campos.