Translating Himmelweg and The Persistence of Memory

COMPANY / SPEAKER: Prof. David Johnston Queen´s University Belfast

SINOPSIS

Prof. David Johnston’s talk reflects upon what it means to translate a play like Himmelweg, itself the vivid translation of a past we are in danger of forgetting. And yet the memories that recreate that past are irrevocably infused not only with the nightmare of survival, but also with the guilt of inaction.

In that way it is a play about translation itself, about how and what we remember, about how we relate to and memorialise the past, as well as about theatre, about how and why we act out our allotted roles in the most brutal of circumstances, and how we name ourselves in the face of the unnameable.