Virginia Woolf once declared, “I always think of my books as music before I write them.” Taking seriously the metaphoric relation between music and literature instituted by the “as” of this statement, this essay argues that her literary works can be read as translations—though not in the usual sense of a direct correspondence between two languages or aesthetic forms. Reading her short story “The String Quartet” alongside Walter Benjamin’s theorization of language and translation, I contend that the text’s formal idiosyncrasies represent the disruption of language by music, a phenomenon that is necessary for proper translation. Ultimately, what Woolf’s translational practice intends toward is not the translation of musical knowledge or sense, but the transmission of an experience, which can only take place in the gap between music and language that translation opens.