The double translation

The performance is based on the multilingualism that characterizes the online project Dream Archive, which collects more than 2,000 dreams in different languages. In the performance participate six people – they read and then successively translate texts of dreams, from English, Italian, Spanish, French, German and Russian language, into Croatia language. For each language several dreams are selected from Dream Archive.

The performance starts from the premise of double translation that occurs in the reading the texts of dreams in foreign languages. The first translation occurs in the reconstruction/writing down of a dream by dreamer, in an attempt to transfer the language of unconscious in the language of conscious. The loss that inevitable happens in this transfer, depends on the intensity and clarity of the dream, and on the ability of dreamer to transfer a dream. The second translation which also includes a certain loss in dream transmission, takes place in the process of translation of a dream, from one language to another language. But for listeners who do not know the language from which translates a dream, this is an immeasurable loss in the both translation.