This paper deals with the mystical experiences in Virginia Woolf’s artistic creation. Woolf denies any form of modernism that cannot transcend reality. There are moments, where reality is never what it is but a vision — a perspective — whose meaning is beyond the graspable. Reality, thus, becomes un-reality — a halo, and the artist becomes a contemplator — a devotee to such visionary manifestation. Virginia Woolf does not make an exception to this rule. She is par excellence a mystic. (...) The artistic design of her novels, mainly, To the Lighthouse, is of transcendental dimension. Both, Mrs Ramsay’s and Lily Briscoe’s perceptions of life are beyond the palpable: their selves merge within a process of sublimation comparable to that of mysticism. In other words, art (mainly fiction) becomes a process of change from the factual to the transmutable. (shrink)

The aim of this contribution is to examine and unveil the Augustinian time process and self-examination in Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse.” The latter is a successful (re)presentation of the interrelation between human consciousness and time “control”. The self cannot be defined without time dimension. Woolf seems to confirm that time is more interior than exterior and is an essential part of human being: it is through it that human being is felt as a part of the world. There are (...) some powerful statements of her characters that show strange similarities to Augustine’s doctrine of time, memory and existence. This triad characterizes his works, mainly “Confessions.” Woolf’s characters are so contemplative. We find them looking outward in order to discover their inside. The internal and the external are the focus of time knowledge and self-discovery. They are dialogically interrelated and define one another. The self is an ever “IS” within the presentness of the present: the “was” (past) is only a memory (“the no-longer”) and the “will be” (future) is only the “not-yet” that has to come in order to become a present. In Augustine’s doctrine, the past and the future do not exist because they are absent in the present. Yet, their only existence is the present – the NOW. Consciousness preserves one’s past within itself. The individual meets and examines himself through consciousness. Mrs. Ramsay in “To the Lighthouse” experiments these dimensions and tries to define herself through time. (shrink)

Does translation of the literary text really need a theory? If yes which one among so many, which complicate more than simplify the matter? Which strategy do we adopt to at least communicate something of the original to a target reader, who does not know anything of the source language? The key problem is the meaning. Is it really grasped? If yes, is it of the text, or of the author, or of the reader? Meaning is not restricted to linguistic (...) parameters; it is more cognitive and essentially based on the interpreter’s own world knowledge. The text is not only a product but essentially an on-going process of meaning. Though it has precise time and space when produced, it is, nonetheless, timeless and spaceless. When we animate it, through reading, it becomes a text within the scope of a new space and a new time. That is, the meaning in the process of translation becomes anew. The text is autonomous and its autonomy makes it have its own specificity and existence. And so, the meaning in/of the text is ever-changing: there is no one meaning in/of the text, as there is no one reader of the text. (shrink)