Abstract
This chapter charts a movement towards something uncertain. It is about how we enter into representations of a culture and engage in the multiple acts of translation needed for their transmission to another culture. This engagement began for me in the course of my work on the translation of theatre. All work in theatre demands a constant crossing of boundaries, and its investigation requires a parallel fluidity in crossing boundaries of thought and analysis: it demands the ability to recognize, locate, receive and question the multiple elements that inform any one piece. This chapter begins to explore and articulate some of these processes. It is concerned with the problem of transmitting experience from one culture to another and, given the recent history of Chile, with the place of memory, the possibility of the translation and transmission of memory, and of the violence embedded in memory.
All legends are as old as memory and memory tends to be fragile and to follow paths that are not always to our liking.
(Radrigán 1996: 5)
I suspect that I am entering […] a whole new sensibility that is in the air for many people now, and that is perhaps […] the product of the vertiginous and violent accumulation of events and information that we have not yet managed to turn into concepts and that are disfigured for that reason, becoming only instantan eous impressions, a type of bewildering distortion.
(Wolff 1994: 72)
Versions of this essay have been presented as a Cambridge Hispanic Research Seminar, paper (3 February 1999) and at the Institute of Latin American Studies in London (24 May 1999). It is part of a longer consid eration of the possibilities of translation, cultural transmission and the place of memory, particularly in relation to the recent history of Chile. I would like to thank all those who have made comments at the talks and on versions of this essay. All translations in the text are my own, unless otherwise indicated.
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Boyle, C. (2000). Violence in Memory: Translation, Dramatization and Performance of the Past in Chile. In: Jones, A.B., Munck, R. (eds) Cultural Politics in Latin America. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-63055-4_6
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