The White Review

Je est un autre

The January issue of The White Review is a translation issue, edited by Daniel Medin, and features

• Hagoromo by Paul Griffiths
• Letters From a Seducer by Hilda Hilst, trans. John Keene
• Leg Over Leg by Ahmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, trans. Humphrey Davies
• Textile by Orly Castel-Bloom, trans. Dalya Bilu
• The Black Lake by Hella S. Haasse, trans. Ina Rilke
• Three Poems by Antjie Krog
• Son of Man by Yi Mun-yol, trans. Brother Anthony of Taizé
• The Dispossessed by Szilárd Borbély, trans. Ottilie Mulzet
• To Kill a Dog by Samanta Schweblin, trans. Brendan Lanctot
• Vertical Motion by Can Xue, trans. Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping
• Tuesday Will be War by Jáchym Topol, trans. Alex Zucker
• Afterword: Death of the Translator by George Szirtes

Reframing art

David Shields on originality (what else) in The White Review.

Originally, feathers evolved to retain heat; later, they were repurposed for a means of flight. No one ever accuses the descendants of ancient birds of plagiarism for taking heat-retaining feathers and modifying them into wings for flight. In our current system, the original feathers would be copyrighted, and upstart birds would get sued for stealing the feathers for a different use. Almost all famous discoveries (by Darwin, Edison, Einstein, et al.) were not lightning-bolt epiphanies but were built slowly over time and heavily dependent on the intellectual superstructure of what had come before them. E.g., the commonplace book was popular among English intellectuals in the seventeenth-nineteenth centuries. These notebooks were a depository for thoughts and quotes and were usually categorised by topic. Enquire Within Upon Everything, a commercially successful parody of the commonplace book, was published in London in 1890. There’s no such thing as originality. Invention and innovation grow out of networks of people and ideas. All life on earth (and by extension, technology) is built upon appropriation and reuse of the pre-existing.