World Languages and Cultures Speaker Series

Talk by Leah Leone Anderson

A Translation of His Own? Borges and Virginia Woolf

On commission, Jorge Luis Borges translated A Room of One’s Own into Spanish in 1936 and Orlando in 1937. Both translations had tremendous impacts among Spanish language readers who came to celebrate the feminist rhetoric of the former and the narrative innovations of the latter. Comparative analyses of original and translation reveal that important aspects of these acclaimed features were in fact attenuated by an author/translator whose own narrative style was diametrically opposed to that of Virginia Woolf.

Dr. Leah Leone Anderson is a translator from Spanish and Portuguese and a scholar of Borges, translation, feminism and care ethics. Her book Borges’s Creative Infidelities: Translating Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner was published by Bloomsbury in 2024 and was recently released in paperback. She is a graduate of UWM’s MA in Language, Literature and Translation program.