Time Dissolved, Style Transformed: The Albanian Translation of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway

Abstract

This article examines how Virginia Woolf’s modernist style, characterized by stream of consciousness, syntactic fragmentation, and figurative density, is translated into Albanian through Dorjan Kroqi’s version of Mrs Dalloway. Drawing on the approach of expressive stylistics, the study conducts a comparative textual analysis of three representative fragments, which are examined at four stylistic levels: lexical, syntactic, figurative, and emotional. The approach builds on the theoretical contributions of Galperin, Leech and Short, Munday, Boase-Beier, and Toury. The findings show that the Albanian translation, while preserving narrative coherence and semantic meaning, tends to soften or regulate stylistic discontinuities, emotional layering, and rhythmic fragmentation, essential features of Woolf’s literary modernism. This tendency reflects a broader pattern of “translational normalization,” — the tendency to adapt stylistic irregularities to the norms of the target language — in accordance with the stylistic norms of Albanian prose. The article argues that the translation of modernist literature into languages with limited traditions of stylistic experimentation requires a high sensitivity to form both as an expressive and interpretive function. Expressive stylistics, in this context, offers a valuable tool for assessing the translatability of aesthetic experience. The study contributes to the field of translation studies by showing how linguistic choices affect the emotional and perceptual depth of the original text in the target language.