Translation and controversial monuments in Tallinn

There has been a significant literature developing in recent years considering translation as a cultural practice going beyond the linguistic domain. The concept of translation has been applied, for example, to multilingual cities as focal points of translation between different languages, cultures, identities and memories (e.g. Simon 2012). This chapter conceives of translation as an analytical tool to explore the meaning making of monuments. Monuments are widely used to promote the dominant worldviews of those in power. As such, monuments have both commemorative and political functions: formally erected to preserve the memory of specific events and identities, they present the cultural positions of those that took the initiative for their erection, while obscuring others. National elites are aware of the power of monuments and use them as tools to legitimate the primacy of their power and promote the kinds of ideals they want citizens to strive towards. However, individuals interpret monuments in ways that can be different or even contrary to the elites’ intentions. This has been particularly evident in post-Soviet countries, independent states that emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990–1991. Here national elites have extensively used monuments as a primary ‘translation strategy’ to culturally reinvent urban space (Torop 2010: xxvi, 230). Specifically, the redesign of Soviet monuments and the erection of new ones have been two distinct but concurrent practices to shape specific worldviews consistent with the new cultural and political condition. However, these initiatives have not been accepted by the entire population in post-Soviet countries, where multiple memories and identities coexist at the societal level. The chapter is divided into two parts. Part 1 is conceptual and it suggests categorizing translation through a semiotic perspective to explore the role of monuments in transferring the meanings of existing urban spaces into new cultural contexts as well as in constructing and spreading new cultural and political meanings in space. To do so, it first outlines the major steps that make translation studies move towards the nonlinguistic domain, and then highlights the rationale of analyzing monuments as translation strategies able to legitimize specific cultural worldviews (Torop 2010). Part 2 explores these ideas by analyzing three monuments in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, each representing a different stage in the process of cultural reinvention of the Estonian urban space.