By connecting heritage to the decomposition of material memory, French writer Marguerite Yourcenar made a sensous observation on “the ruin of things.” The way “the erosion of the elements and the brutality of man unite to create an unwonted appearance” is akin to physical markings of the alternating phases of adoration, admiration, love, hatred, and indifference. Hence, monuments which sojourn time and memory “owe the beauty to human violence” with “each wound,” potentially, helping “us to reconstruct a crime and sometimes even to discover its cause.” Vilnius’ memory in particular is prone to injury and unrequited love, not only because there is, so to speak, no single language or territory where it can be found and placed, but also because for the most part the referential framework of local heritage is based on the idea of mistaken identity. The past in Vilnius is almost always a devil in disguise, conversant at first sight but alienating or even threatening under closer inspection. As a result, one of the least damaging modes of heritage resilience in Vilnius is silence, if not nothingness. More often than not Vilnius’ heritage is subjected to translation – a form of disfigurement that assigns new voice and location to the place. My talk is about the intersection of violence, heritage and language in Vilnius, about the way (mis)translation makes the narration of the place. By taking a long view on the city’s memory and with the background of my home, Vancouver (Canada), I hope to map the heritage geography of my native Vilnius as the successive degrees of erosion and attrition, uncover crime scenes in the places of courtship.

Lecture was held during the 6th Heritage Forum of Central Europe.

Laimonas Briedis is a writer and scholar of history, literature and the geographical imagination of Lithuania. A native of Vilnius (Lithuania), he has lived for most of his adult life in Vancouver (Canada) where he completed a doctoral degree in cultural geography at the University of British Columbia. He received his postdoctoral degree in history at the University of Toronto. His research and literary investigation explores the deepest cultural strands of Lithuania in relationship to different parts of the world. His creative output stretches from charting a GIS anchored global digital map of the multilingual literature of Vilnius to examining the ramifications of being bi-local; placing questions related to belonging, migration, diaspora, translation and memory at the core of his work. Laimonas is the author of many books, articles and works of translation, and he has presented his ideas and work at Tedx and on numerous radio and television programs in multiple countries. Among his non-fiction books is the bestselling Vilnius: City of Strangers, surveying the history of European culture through the changing cultural and linguistic landscape of Vilnius. The book has been translated into several languages, including, Lithuanian, German, Chinese, Russian and Portuguese. He is currently mining KGB archival files for his next book on the Cold War divide of his family divide between Canada and the Soviet Union, and is also writing a history of cultural memory of Lithuania. Laimonas has had appearances in numerous literary events, including at the London, Frankfurt and Leipzig book fairs, and has served on the International Competition Jury at the Leipzig Documentary Film Festival.