Willa Muir aka Agnes Neill Scott born Willa Anderson (13 March 1890 – 22 May 1970) was a Scottish novelist, essayist and translator.[1] She was the major part of a translation partnership with her husband,
Edwin Muir. She and her husband translated the works of many notable German-speaking authors including
Franz Kafka. They were given an award in 1958 in their joint names; however, Willa recorded in her journal that her husband "only helped".
Life
Willa Muir was born Wilhelmina Johnston Anderson in 1890 in
Montrose, where she spent her childhood. Her parents were originally from
Unst in the
Shetland Islands, and the Shetland dialect of the
Scots language was spoken at home.[2] She was one of the first Scottish women to attend university, and she studied classics at the
University of St Andrews, graduating in 1910 with a first class degree.[3] In 1919 she married the poet
Edwin Muir[1] and gave up her job in London as assistant principal of
Gipsy Hill teacher training college.[3][4]
In the 1920s the couple lived in continental Europe for two periods, living in Montrose at other times.[5] During their first period, she supported them by teaching at the Internationalschule in
Hellerau, which was run by her friend
A. S. Neill.[6]
Willa and her husband worked together on many translations, most notable the major works of
Franz Kafka. They had translated The Castle within six years of Kafka's death. In her memoir of Edwin Muir, Belonging, Willa describes the method of translation that she and her husband adopted in their Kafka translations:[7]
"We divided the book in two, Edwin translated one half and I the other, then we went over each other's translations as with a fine-tooth comb."
Willa was the more able linguist and she was the major contributor. She recorded in her journal that her husband "only helped". Between 1924 and the start of the
Second World War her (their) translation financed their life together.[8] In addition she also translated on her own account under the name of Agnes Neill Scott.[9] The couple spent considerable time touring in Europe and she expressed some regret that she had lost a home.[3]
A satirical portrait of Willa and Edwin appears in Wyndham Lewis's
The Apes of God (1930).[10] When Willa and her husband met Lewis in the mid-1920s, she recorded her sense that he was "one of those Englishmen who do not have the habit of talking to women."[11]
Her book Women: An Inquiry is a book-length
feminist essay.[1] Her 1936 book Mrs Grundy in Scotland is an investigation of the anxieties and pressure to conform to respectability norms in Scottish life.[12]
In 1958, Willa and Edwin Muir were granted the first
Johann-Heinrich-Voss Translation Award.[13] Her husband died in 1959 and she wrote a memoir Belonging (1968) about their life together. She died at
Dunoon in 1970.[14]
^Winkelman, Donald M (1968). "Living with Ballads by Willa Muir". The Journal of American Folklore. 81 (319): 77–78.
doi:
10.2307/537445.
JSTOR537445.
Further reading
Michelle Woods, Kafka Translated: How Translators Have Shaped Our Reading of Kafka, New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Aileen Christianson, Moving in Circles: Willa Muir's Writings, Edinburgh, Word Power Books, 2007.
Patricia R. Mudge, Catriona Soukup, and Lumir Soukup, essays in
Chapman 71 (1992–93)
P.H. Butler, Willa Muir: Writer, Edwin Muir: Centenary Assessments ed. by C.J.M. MacLachlan and D.S. Robb (1990) pp. 58–74.
Margaret Elphinstone, 'Willa Muir: Crossing the Genres', in A History of Scottish Women's Writing, ed. Douglas Gifford and
Dorothy McMillan (1997) pp. 400–15.
Willa Muir, Belonging: A Memoir, London: Hogarth Press, 1968.