並列摘要
Virginia Woolf with her great talent as a writer and thinker wins high acclaim in contemporary literary history. There is no doubt that she is one of the most distinguished modernist writers in the twentieth century. Poetic impressionism and indirect narration are the most celebrated among her innovative skills as a writer. In the meantime, her concerns about women's status and women writers' potentials also inspire many feminists of later generations. Does her work, after being translated into Chinese, also influence her Chinese readers in Taiwan in the same way as its original to her English readers? According to Itamar Even-Zohar, translated literature maintains a central position in the literary polysystem. He suggests that it participates actively in shaping the center of the polysystem. When Virginia Woolf was first introduced to Taiwan's readers in 1961, her works were indeed seen as a stimulus to the then literary production. Not until the I 990s are her works translated into Chinese in a larger scale and more acknowledged by Taiwan's readers, yet only a certain novels are translated and in some cases, one novel has three or four different translations. Why are the delay and the repetition? Do her works also influence other systems beside literary production? This essay aims to apply Even-Zohar's polysystem theory to examine how Virginia Woolf's translated works influences Taiwan's literary and cultural productions and how Taiwan's readers read and understand Woolf's works.