A Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, poet and translator, Dr Stephen Tapscott, gave Charlie Chaplin’s films an imagist interpretation, and had a poetry reading session with UIC students at the Writer's Workshop on 25 and 26 March.
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| Dr Stephen Tapscott at the Writer's Workshop |
Media translation
The poet and translator said that Charlie Chaplin’s films and modern poetry emerged at almost the same time, both paying particular attention to ordinary working class life and the moral structure among different classes.
He gave a close reading of the first few shots of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, quoting from Ezra Pound that an image is what “presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time”.
“German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's ideas of the triad – thesis, antithesis and synthesis – can best explain the beginning of the story,” he said.
“Thesis: it says Modern Times is a story of industry, of individual enterprise and of humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness. But what we see later is the harder the factory workers work, the farther they fall behind (antithesis). The synthesis solves the conflict between the thesis and antithesis - we are aware of the lamentable reality but we still persevere 'in the pursuit of happiness'.”
“Taking the representation of images, media translation is translating the mode of information into the verbal mode,” Dr Tapscott said.
Poetry reading and conversation
The next day Dr Stephen Tapscott continued the Writer's Workshop in a session of Poetry Reading and Conversation.
He read some pieces of One Hundred Love Sonnets, which reproduces the text of Pablo Neruda's Spanish original with Dr Stephen Tapscott's own English translation.
In addition to his sentient and infectious recitation, he shared his thoughts on some of those pieces. He also asked two UIC students who study Spanish to read out the original Spanish versions of two poems to the audience.
Dr Stephen Tapscott told students that writing poems is like working on a paper. “If you set your ambition that high, you will fail. But if you step back, saying that I am going to write something and tomorrow I will go back to revise it, you will make it better and better. The process is more about showing up and giving yourself permission to fail.”
After the conclusion of the Writer's Workshop, a Year One student of the Contemporary English Language and Literature Programme, Jiang Yushu, told a reporter, “While Dr Tapscott is reading poems, he totally changes to another person, and I truly see the passion and high spirit in him.”
The Writer’s Workshop was organised by the Institute of Cross-Cultural Studies and the Programmes of Contemporary English Language and Literature and Applied Translation Studies, the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Reporter: Du Shasha
Photographers: Wang Ze and Vivi Xie
Editor: Deen He
(from MPRO, with special thanks to the ELC)
