This publication by Padraig Robinson and Daniel Frota was made in context of Publishing Class III: How to Live together, DAI. This publication was devised in the model of a conversation in collaboration with designer Daniel Frota, where the act of writing was used to explore the “idiorrhythmic” nature of the discourse around images.The starting point was an image published on The Guardian’s website on Monday 18th February 2013, which is an Instagram image said to be depicting a Palestinian boy in the cross hairs of an Israeli sniper’s rifle zoom. The distinct texts between artist and designer perhaps suggested that the nature of such pictures in general, even those that could be considered “political” at a given moment, have a very unusual condition within the online, digital circulation of social networking. The writing created a problematic regarding the agency of vision, based on an "ethical reaction" for an other we will never meet via image media. This is discussed, and indeed averted, through two individual perspectives — or a fragment of writing about vision. 

WT reader with contributions by Amir Avraham, Fred Cave, Yana Foque, Daniel Frota, Virginie Gauthier, Daria Kiseleva, Mathew Kneebone, Fay Kolokytha, Menelaos Kouroudis, Jungmyung Lee, Ivan Martinez, Laura Pappa, Christine Pogatchnik and Maria Jimena Sanchez. Edited by Daniel Frota, Menelaos Kouroudis, and Maxine Kopsa.

‘If magic is sometimes very close to nothing at all, it might be indeed possible to mistake one for the other. No wonder language found its origin in myths. This summer reader is about the cup of coffee that keeps us awake every morning. How much of it has to do with caffeine and how much of it with our will to believe in rituals? Amen’.

The view of translation as a second-rate, derivative form of writing, seems to prevail in Western discourse on the subject since sometime around the 17th century. The lowly status of translation is reflected in standard book publishing practices and in modern copyright law. It is perhaps because of our desire to think of the translations as a trancparency, a clear window through which we see the meaning of the original, that we lose sight of the obvious impossibility of one-to-one correspondence and take for granted the presence of the translator and the choices and praxis involved in the task (Matvei Yankelevich).

Compilation of notes and introductions written by translators on different attitudes towards the level of transparency and authorship of their mediation, as well as the inescapable trade-off they have to face between form and meaning. Fifteen contributors dealing with analogous concerns in their practices, selected pages from their personal libraries, present in the book as facsimile versions.

Contributions by Derek Byrne, Fred Cave, Cecília Costa, Paul Elliman, Yana Foqué, Daniel Frota, Virginie Gauthier, Will Holder, Mathew Kneebone, Menealos Kouroudis, Pedro Moraes, Miguel Nóbrega, Maria Jimena Sanchez, Lisette Smits and Sarah Tripp.