Thinking Through Translation with Theodoros Angelopoulos: Journeys, Border Crossings, Liminality
Thinking Through Translation with Theodoros Angelopoulos: Journeys, Border Crossings, Liminality

Summary/Abstract: In this paper, I propose to examine the question of journeys, borders, and translation in Theodoros Angelopoulos’ Trilogy of Borders: The Suspended Step of the Stork (1991), Ulysses’ Gaze (1995) and Eternity and a Day (1998), winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. It is my aim to contribute, in a small way, to the ongoing discussion about the role of translation in creating understanding, using as a case in point the work of a major contemporary poet of the screen who created his own aesthetics of the journey and whose films are vehicles of discovery, taking the viewer across many borders, on a fabulous – but often unsettling and perilous – voyage which challenges long-held assumptions about self, others, and translation. I suggest there is a plausible link between translation and liminality, a concept introduced in anthropology by Arnold van Gennep in the beginning of the 20th century and later brought to the fore by Victor Turner.

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