© "Орландо" Вірджинія Вулф

© "Орландо" Вірджинія Вулф

Let me say only that before
she was shoved out into a brick-lined air well to await the death sentence of the god
Phoebus, I tried to grant her fondest wish, that she should have the body of a woman,
a fit shape for the tragic dimension of her soul.

Well, in my clumsy alchemy, slicing heads from bodies and stumbling to transplant
one to another, I failed. Some night when I am drunk on the blood of many victims,
and more accustomed than I am now to confession, I will recount it, my crude and sinister operations, conducted with a sorcerer’s willfulness and a boy’s blundering, and describe in grim and grotesque detail the writhing jerking catastrophe that rose from beneath my scalpel and my surgical needle and thread.