‘The Past Is a Foreign Country’
Reimaging Formosa as a Translation Space in the Red Fort Museum
Keywords:
Translation Space, Museum Translation, Cultural Heritage, Discordant TranslationAbstract
‘The past is a foreign country’ is more than a metaphor for the strangeness of the past – it is often a reality of what Sherry Simon refers to as ‘translation space’, with its layers of everyday practices across time carried out in different languages and cultural norms. This article examines the reconstruction of a heritage site in Taiwan to explore how translation acts as a gatekeeper by selecting what aspects of the past are carried into the present. It explores both the physical space of the heritage site and the imagined space conceived by a foreign traveller’s diary and its translations. While the physical site anchors intangible memories in place, literary texts – containing the memories of individual writers (mediated through translators) – reactivate the ruins. The combination of the two spaces transforms the heritage site into a live performance of a (translated) past.Downloads
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