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so so hello i am rhino schulte the director of the center for translation studies at the university of texas at dallas
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the center was founded in 1988 and we recently published a 40-year history of the center that is now available in
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book form today i would like to address my words to a book that i have known for many many years i want to use the book
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as a starting point for possible changes that could happen in the future in the arts and humanities i am a professor of the humanities and i'm also a pianist so i have thought a
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great deal of why this book which is johann hozinga homo ludens still in the latin form ludens comes from ludere and means to play it's the
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present participle so what we have here is a person who thought about calling his book man playing i was wondering why i was so attracted
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to this book hoizinger shows the form and the importance of play in many parts of our daily life
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obviously in the arts in the performing arts in literature but also he shows it in law and any of some of the other professional
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organizations so i was wondering whether i from my point of view could use the idea and the practice of play
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to rejuvenate the address and the entering into artistic works especially literary works play per se has no
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immediate regular functions in our life however everything we touch has a sense of play whether it's children whether it is a company whether it is a
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group etc wherever we look the play is there but the play has no ulterior motives it doesn't ask for any money it doesn't ask for any conclusions
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it is there so the first thing one can say is that play creates tension and it seems to me that we should think more about the tension
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as i progress i want to create tension with the performance that i do i want to create tension with a piece of literature that i read
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and so the idea of play might be a new way of entering the scenery of interpretation i think all acts of our daily
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activities are acts of translation and acts of interpretation as george sina said all acts of communication are acts of translation
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and i would like to transfer this idea to the notion of play as a writer one play one begins to play with the ideas with a situation with the
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atmosphere that i would like to perform and write as a performer i am continuously involved in figuring out how a particular piece
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of music was created how it was put together our tendency is generally to say this is what it means and i think there we are
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outside of the realm of play play does not ask me what does it mean play asks me to create the tension and to live within the tension that will
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lead to something the result the end of that i do not know when i'm involved in the play so in another sense the play is unpredictable and we know this from experiences of our
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own or begin to play just in form of physical place or in forms of artistic place dance whatever it might be so what i consider the function
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and the importance of play these days that we move away from describing everything the object that we have we are inclined to say this is what this object means
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this is what this short story means this is what this picture means etc etc but what i would like to establish is to look at the notion of play
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which is basically to establish a tension between me and the text between me and the play so i would like to see that we get away from the notion of describing which in
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itself is always finite to a notion and to a practice that will establish relationships and here comes the word that i think the play
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is very well equipped to help us is to establish a dialogue with the text and an interaction with the text and as i do that i begin to play
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with the text i'm trying to reconstruct the play that the original artist the writer has put into the creation of the text
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so my function is that without saying from the very beginning i want to give you an idea what this means because meaning in itself or a meaning is
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finite and doesn't help us very much to go to the next step however establishing an interaction in the term of playing with the text will give us a chance to
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be continuously involved in the check in the text let's say for example i have a novel i can begin to play with the novel by looking at one character and i play with
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the character of how that character has been played throughout the novel so i'm getting a movement in me following the movement
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of the character that the writer has created i can do the same if i look at the fugue by j.a spark i can see how the fugue was
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put together i move from one voice to the next voice to the next voice and in doing so i get a sense of what the voice is and as soon as the voice is juxtaposed to another voice or to
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another transition then i have a new tension that i become involved in and i live in it play means to live inside play means to be in
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a form of creating tension at all times and that what makes the huge difference if we are able to think about play as a rejuvenation as a revitalization
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of the way we approach artistic works the way we approach essays the way we approach the interpretation also of musical pieces which in many cases people have serious
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difficulties because they do not know how one can approach it i just think of all the difficulties we have had in beginning to understand what
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stravinsky was doing in his music this is only one case one can may also talk about child's eyes the unanswered questions which introduce a different
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kind of sensibility so i as the listener i who wants as the listener reinterpret enter into the musical piece
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i find moments where i can begin to play with the text i begin to dialogue with the text i begin to open the text so that is continuously moving
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in my own mind and i don't exit from the text and i do not reduce the interpretation of the text to one definitive meaning i should say
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that there's no such thing as the only definitive interpretation of a work i should also say that there's no such thing as the only definitive performance of a
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musical work a pianist is not capable of performing the same piece from one day to the next exactly the same it will be a different kind of
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walking through the text through the score which is from my point i see view another form of playing with a text and therefore the more i can
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revitalize my playing with the text i will enlarge the interpretation from my performing point of view with the score and this is what we also need to have to
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stop the red reducing a text to one particular meaning which in general has been for many years the function of literary
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criticism and from my point of view i now see that the initiative that came to me from
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hosinger's book homo ludens which he translated from the german himself is one guideline
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to rethink of how we would like to approach how we would like to enter and how we would like to activate the
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interpretation in this case in my case i would say of literary works so that become alive in the mind of the reader in my mind as the
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interpreter and therefore each time when i re-enter the work i have a different kind of approach which i could call very simply reactivate another form of play with the
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text you
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