Discussion | 700 Years of Vilnius, a City of Translation (in-person and online)

The history and geography of Vilnius are marked by linguistic pluralism, cultural variations, territorial rearrangements, and human losses that make temporal correspondence and spatial continuity hard to decipher. Since the first written records of the city in 1323, Vilnius was put on the path of translation. The existence of many languages and the sense of discontinuity point to diversity and conflict, but translation unravels the tensions, interactions, rivalries, or convergences among different points of views, knowledge and experiences of the place.

In the context of Vilnius, translation is often an outcome or response to erasure. Still, as Czeslaw Milosz pointed out, "everything would be fine if language did not deceive us finding / different names for the same thing in different times and places." In one of his poems dedicated to his hometown, the poet construes Wilno as a city without name, underpinning its untranslatable - 'unexpressed, untold' - character. On the other hand, for Moyshe Kulbak, the Jewish city opens up as "the dream of a cabbalist" with a "thousand narrow doors into the universe." Contrastingly, Avrom Sutzkver, in his threnody to Vilna, makes the town omnipresent with 'all the cities [being transformed] into your image.' As an act of creation, translation offers a possibility of entering Vilnius from an unknown territory; simultaneously, it frames the city within 'unfamiliar tongues.'

In commemorating 700 years of the founding of Vilnius, Laimonas Briedis will give a presentation about the city as a form of translation, from poetic imagery and visual records to tangible geography and memory fragments. Briedis's presentation will be followed by a discussion moderated by Jonathan Brent in which Briedis will be joined by Laima Lauckaite, Irena Grudzinska Gross, and David Roskies.