This article presents the results of a preliminary investigation into some of the problems and issues implicit in the translation of the literary essay. After discussing the principal characteristics of the genre as defined by scholars working in the fields of rhetoric and of social discourse analysis (Angenot, I'aquette, Snyder, Terrasre), the author studies a particular essay Virginia Woolf's "How It Strikes a Contemporary» (1925), and its 1962 translation by Rose Celli, "Ce qui frappe un contemporain" in an attempt to make a first tentative identification of those dimensions of the essay which are likely to be significantly affected by the translation process. This preliminary investigation would seem to indicate that, in the case of this particular essay at least, the translation process alters Woof's relationship to her text and to the "corpus culture)" (Paquette) of which the text is a part. The translation process thus weakens the specificity of the essay as essay (that is, if we accept that one of the essays functions, as Paquette has noted, is that of "totalisation"). The alteration is primarily a consequence of the relocation, through various stylistic and lexica) means, of the essays surface message into a context of reference that is totally absent from the original, with the result that the underlying and more subversive message is obscured. As such, the translation can be been as a "rewriting" (Lefevere) of the original that modifies the function of the essay, changing it from a "primary" type discourse to a "secondary" type disscourse (Even-Zohar).