Marielle O’Neill and Elte Rauch. Photo copyright by Marielle O’Neill.
Marielle O’Neill, executive council member of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, joined publisher HetMoet for the launch of its Dutch translations of Am I a Snob? by Virginia Woolf and The Wise Virgins by Leonard Woolf.
About the launch
Hosted by HetMoet, publisher Elte Rauch and bookstagram influencer Corina Maduro, the Jan. 26 launch event included a panel discussion with translators Jetty Huisman, Thomas Heij and Pauline Slot.
Featured speakers included:
- Woolf scholar Marielle O’Neill, who is undertaking a PhD. on Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s political activism at Leeds Trinity University,
- Rindhert Kromhout, who wrote a trilogy of young adult books about the Bloomsbury Group from the perspectives of Quentin and Angelica Bell, and
- actor Milou van Duijnhoven, who recently starred in an Amsterdam-production of Orlando.
Elte Rauch mixes a Stinger at the Amsterdam book launch. Photo copyright by Marielle O’Neill.
The event included 1920s jazz music, along with shakers full of Vita Sackville-West and Violet Trefusis’ favorite cocktail, the Stinger, a concoction of brandy and creme de menthe.
“It was wonderful to see Virginia Woolf being read, discussed and celebrated 142 years after her birth. And it was especially refreshing to see a spotlight being shone on Leonard Woolf; an influential and important political thinker and — with Virginia — a pioneering publisher,” O’Neill said.
About the translations
Hetmoet published the first Dutch translation of On Being Ill in 2021.
HetMoet is a Dutch indie publisher run by Rauch, who recently set up HetMoet’s UK imprint, The New Menard Press, with Anthony Rudolf, who wrote the foreword for The Wise Virgins.
Leonoor Broeder’s translation is excellent. [This Dutch edition deviates] from the original by arranging the texts chronologically, but that works out fortunately. The separate parts thus form a coherent whole that reads like the autobiography that Woolf was unable to complete (while his husband Leonard could not stop and published a six-part autobiography). – Koen Schouwenburg, De Groene Amsterdammer
Rindhert Kromhout. Photo copyright by Marielle O’Neill.
Jetty Huisman, Thomas Heij and Pauline Slot. Photo copyright by Marielle O’Neill.
