I have just finished reading a book of short stories by Virginia Woof, A Haunted House and Other Stories. It is a collection put together by Leonard Woolf in 1943. My book is the fifth printing, 1953, by the Woolfs’ own Hogarth Press. The exact designation, on the copyright page is: “Fifth Impression (Reset)".
In the very last story, “A Summing Up”, I came across this:
There was a sound in his voice, some accent of emphasis, some lustre in the incongruity of his ideas, some emanation from his round, cubbby brown face and robin redbreast’s figure, something immaterial, and unseizable, which existed and flourished and made itself felt independently of his words, indeed, often in opposition to them.
Cubbby. I wondered what the word was that slipped from the fingers of the linotypist coming to the blessed end of another job (typos are more often found toward the end of books) and (for a similar reason) evaded the proofreader’s blue pencil. I rejected “chubby” because it seemed redundant after “round”; “clubby” perhaps, or “cubby,” a Woolfian neologism. But “chubby” seems to be correct.
“Cubbby,” however, lives on in the ether. Searching for cubbby and woolf (and assuring Google that no, I did not mean cubby and wolf) I found eight links. I assume that they all are scanned from the Hogarth Press Fifth Impression (Reset).
1) A .doc version of the story from the Lycée Georges Brassens on Réunion, the French isle which lies forlornly off the coast of Madagascar. Bravo, English teachers of Georges Brassens High, who found for their students a neat, but not too, too difficult 4-page piece by one of our language’s great innovators. I just wonder how they deal with translating “cubbby”?
2) A print-on-demand book, part of the Complete Works of Woolf, published by Delphi Classics.
3) A Google e-book of just this tiny story, available for $1.99, promoted by the following blurb:
A Summing Up was written in the year 1944 [that is, three years after she died] by Virginia Woolf. This book is one of the most popular novels of Virginia Woolf, and has been translated into several other languages around the world. This book is published by Booklassic which brings young readers closer to classic literature globally.
4) A very nicely designed, very readable, web edition of A Haunted House and Other Stories published by the University of Adelaide Library (Australia).
5) A Russian website which might be called E-reading Club. (At the top of each of the site’s pages is a handy lineup of the Roman and Cyrillic alphabets.)
6) Project Gutenberg of Australia. Likely scanned from the same Fifth Impression (Reset) used by the library of the University of Adelaide.
7 & 8) A Russian and a Japanese site (you won’t want links to these) which use a mish-mosh of English prose to, I suppose, attract Google searches.
~~~~~~
I may be wrong, but just from having seen photos of Woolf, I believe the story includes a self-portrait:
The open air and the sense of being out of doors bewildered Sasha Latham, the tall, handsome, rather indolent looking lady, whose majesty of presence was so great that people never credited her with feeling perfectly inadequate and gauche when she had to say something at a party.
In the very last story, “A Summing Up”, I came across this:
There was a sound in his voice, some accent of emphasis, some lustre in the incongruity of his ideas, some emanation from his round, cubbby brown face and robin redbreast’s figure, something immaterial, and unseizable, which existed and flourished and made itself felt independently of his words, indeed, often in opposition to them.
Cubbby. I wondered what the word was that slipped from the fingers of the linotypist coming to the blessed end of another job (typos are more often found toward the end of books) and (for a similar reason) evaded the proofreader’s blue pencil. I rejected “chubby” because it seemed redundant after “round”; “clubby” perhaps, or “cubby,” a Woolfian neologism. But “chubby” seems to be correct.
“Cubbby,” however, lives on in the ether. Searching for cubbby and woolf (and assuring Google that no, I did not mean cubby and wolf) I found eight links. I assume that they all are scanned from the Hogarth Press Fifth Impression (Reset).
1) A .doc version of the story from the Lycée Georges Brassens on Réunion, the French isle which lies forlornly off the coast of Madagascar. Bravo, English teachers of Georges Brassens High, who found for their students a neat, but not too, too difficult 4-page piece by one of our language’s great innovators. I just wonder how they deal with translating “cubbby”?
2) A print-on-demand book, part of the Complete Works of Woolf, published by Delphi Classics.
3) A Google e-book of just this tiny story, available for $1.99, promoted by the following blurb:
A Summing Up was written in the year 1944 [that is, three years after she died] by Virginia Woolf. This book is one of the most popular novels of Virginia Woolf, and has been translated into several other languages around the world. This book is published by Booklassic which brings young readers closer to classic literature globally.
4) A very nicely designed, very readable, web edition of A Haunted House and Other Stories published by the University of Adelaide Library (Australia).
5) A Russian website which might be called E-reading Club. (At the top of each of the site’s pages is a handy lineup of the Roman and Cyrillic alphabets.)
6) Project Gutenberg of Australia. Likely scanned from the same Fifth Impression (Reset) used by the library of the University of Adelaide.
7 & 8) A Russian and a Japanese site (you won’t want links to these) which use a mish-mosh of English prose to, I suppose, attract Google searches.
~~~~~~
I may be wrong, but just from having seen photos of Woolf, I believe the story includes a self-portrait:
The open air and the sense of being out of doors bewildered Sasha Latham, the tall, handsome, rather indolent looking lady, whose majesty of presence was so great that people never credited her with feeling perfectly inadequate and gauche when she had to say something at a party.
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