Translation Art : Edwin C. Gentzler Translation Center : UMass Amherst

Bo Kim (b. 1986, Busan, South Korea)

September 30, 2025 - January 30, 2026

The exhibition explores the art of translating a personal archive through drawing, painting, photography, and archival materials. Kim employs traditional Korean artistic techniques alongside contemporary approaches to investigate how memory and hybridity shape cultural identity. Her work reflects on the fragmented and fluid experience of diasporic existence, interrogating the tensions between place, belonging, and cultural inheritance. By layering personal and collective histories, the exhibition illuminates the duality of being caught between cultures while seeking connection and continuity.

Gennifer Dorgan

April 25, 2025 - September 19, 2025

During a 2024 visit to Boston College, I encountered what seemed like an old friend: the Burns Antiphoner, a fourteenth-century liturgical manuscript from a German-speaking monastery. Because I helped catalogue similar manuscripts in Germany, I immediately recognized characteristic features of the initials, or the letters at the beginning of each chant.

Gregorian chant manuscripts, displaced by conflicts in Europe, have made their way into academic libraries all over the United States. Seemingly repetitive and lacking full-page illuminations (illustrations), they tend to be overlooked. The Burns Antiphoner has been studied by music historians but hasn’t attracted attention as a precious work of art. How can we “translate” manuscripts like this so the general public can enjoy and learn from them? How do we translate across time?

I answer these questions by isolating visual elements of the manuscript as an introduction to these medieval objects. I created each piece in this exhibition by tracing the digital facsimile of the Burns Antiphoner and then laying the tracing over images of blank parchment from another German manuscript. While medieval illuminators would’ve used a quill and ink, I used colored pencils, my preferred medium. By copying the antiphoner’s style and contents, I follow a medieval Catholic spiritual tradition: manuscript production was a meditative exercise, comparable to the production of mandalas in Buddhist monasticism.

If my translation across time is successful, you will enjoy these representations of the Burns Antiphoner with minimal context. Do you recognize the name of a famous chant? Can you figure out something interesting about medieval book production? Bonus: Can you find the three different languages: Latin, German, and Greek? If not, don’t worry! Above all, I hope you find this translation of the Burns Antiphoner beautiful.

Katherine Amaya

March 2024 - March 2025

Words can be lost in translation and in return never be understood or worse never heard. In Drowning Fish, I explore this concept through painting by depicting those thoughts and emotions through fish and bubbles. Someone's world is something others will never quite fully comprehend.

I am a nineteen-year-old university student who grew up with immigrant parents in the United States with Spanish as our first language. Translation is something I have been doing from a very young age. After translating for close to a decade now, I have encountered diverse situations that have changed my perspective of translation and life. For one, it really is such a privilege to not need translation in everyday life. I have come to not take for granted what I have and appreciate the way I have been translating.

As beautiful as it is to grow up bilingual, I have found myself in the middle of two worlds. In Drowning Fish, I depict these two worlds on two different canvases. On one hand the weight of words, feelings, and goals lie over one's head, unable to be expressed while the other is learning how to understand them. While you, the viewer, can do nothing but observe this dynamic unfold.

My love for language has transcended into other aspects of my life such as art. Now I ask you, how does Drowning Fish resonate with your own experiences of communication and understanding?

Sarah Aldawood

September 2023 - February 2024

Translation Art

Memory and Hybridity in Diasporic Spaces

Translating the Past: The Burns Antiphoner

Drowning Fish

Moving Sketches, Moving Translations