During my fellowship in Rome I will compose a large-scale piece for solo horn and sinfonietta focused on the act of translation, and the emotional weight it carries. For over twenty years my mother, who is Estonian, worked on translating Jaan Kross’s epic novel Between Three Plagues into English; the final book of her three-volume translation, A Book of Falsehoods, was published in 2022. I will spend my year in Rome writing a piece that draws inspiration from the text of my mother’s translation including the speech rhythms of Estonian and English, the history of sixteenth-century Estonia as portrayed in the novel, as well as my mother’s extended and methodical work process. I am interested in the many layers of emotion and identity that are carried in the nuances of language and translation, especially for people, like my mother, who live multilingually as part of a diaspora, having been displaced from their homelands. This piece will be written for the hornist Eric Reed and the New York City–based Ensemble Échappé.