‘The weight of every word’: Virginia Woolf’s A Haunted House and Three Italian Translations

Virginia Woolf annotated in her diary: ‘I feel in my fingers the weight of every word, even of a review’. How is the ‘weight of words’ translated from one language into another? How can the insubstance of Woolf’s realities, the aleatoriness of the life the ‘weighty’ words created in the English language be translated into another language? Perhaps, one way to address those questions is to forget those questions; dealing with the literary space one should first and foremost practice reading, delve into the texture of each text, get intimate with the singularity characterising each literary text. To the extent that translation itself is always already the result of an act of reading, the discussion of translations of literary texts contributes to an appreciation of the literary space; in this article I discuss three Italian translations of Woolf’s short story A Haunted House and pursue the idea that the comparative study of translations is also part of the act of reading literature.