Translations

Bonaventure Balla’s favorite word in any language is “cornucopia.” And that’s saying something, because Balla is a translator who speaks seven languages.

As a composer, Sophia Serghi sees her work as translation. She says music is the universal language that can translate our most painful, vulnerable experiences. 

On some level, every book is an act of translation. Kyoko Mori has spent her career as a writer looking back at her Japanese upbringing through the lens of her American life. And she understands that writers have very little control over how a reader will translate a story into their own context.

Over the centuries, the same images and themes occur again and again in settler colonial literature. Rebecca Hightower-Weaver explores how these themes were used to translate unknown lands to colonies–and ultimately sell a harmful myth to would-be settlers.