Catching the Invisible: Translating "Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign: A Book of Appreciations"

This brief article concentrates on my personal experience in translating "Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign: A Book of Appreciations" (1897) into Italian. It provides a reflection on the role of the translator as a privileged reader, as the one able to access more easily, to use Raymond Williams’s words, the structure of feeling, a narrative which is not fully articulated on the page but is to be inferred by reading between the lines. It intends to show how WNQVR reveals, to a close reader, new forma- tions of women’s thought struggling to emerge out of the dominant Victorian discourse while discussing the translation strategies which have been adopted, bearing in mind not only cultural and linguistic differences but also the historical distance that separates us from the original text.