Words Like Painting Brushes. Colours in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and Its Translation by Lech Czyżewski

Colours are an indispensable part of Virginia Woolf’s novels. In The Waves her dynamic brushstrokes, like those of impressionists, make colours come to life and surrender to the movement of the sun. One of the colours on Woolf’s palette is purple. Its ambiguity and specificity has influenced the lexemic variation introduced by Lech Czyżewski in his translation of the novel. The article seeks to establish the status of English purple as well as its Polish counterparts: szkarłatny and purpurowy. The starting point for the analysis is the evident semantic and cognitive ambiguity of purple. The observations concentrate on the use of purple in the novel’s interludes. The modifications of the colour term as well as the distribution of the two colours give intriguing testimony to Woolf’s idea that writers – in this case, translators – are great colourists

Words Like Painting Brushes. Colours in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and Its Translation by Lech Czyżewski

Colours are an indispensable part of Virginia Woolf’s novels. In The Waves her dynamic brushstrokes, like those of impressionists, make colours come to life and surrender to the movement of the sun. One of the colours on Woolf’s palette is purple. Its ambiguity and specificity has influenced the lexemic variation introduced by Lech Czyżewski in his translation of the novel. The article seeks to establish the status of English purple as well as its Polish counterparts: szkarłatny and purpurowy. The starting point for the analysis is the evident semantic and cognitive ambiguity of purple. The observations concentrate on the use of purple in the novel’s interludes. The modifications of the colour term as well as the distribution of the two colours give intriguing testimony to Woolf’s idea that writers – in this case, translators – are great colourists