What do you think?
Rate this book
Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language
Lost in an art—the art of translation. Thus, in an elegant anagram (translation = lost in an art), Pulitzer Prize-winning author and pioneering cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter hints at what led him to pen a deep personal homage to the witty sixteenth-century French poet Clément Marot.”
Le ton beau de Marot” literally means ”The sweet tone of Marot”, but to a French ear it suggests ”Le tombeau de Marot”—that is, ”The tomb of Marot”. That double entendre foreshadows the linguistic exuberance of this book, which was sparked a decade ago when Hofstadter, under the spell of an exquisite French miniature by Marot, got hooked on the challenge of recreating both its sweet message and its tight rhymes in English—jumping through two tough hoops at once. In the next few years, he not only did many of his own translations of Marot's poem, but also enlisted friends, students, colleagues, family, noted poets, and translators—even three state-of-the-art translation programs!—to try their hand at this subtle challenge.
The rich harvest is represented here by 88 wildly diverse variations on Marot's little theme. Yet this barely scratches the surface of Le Ton beau de Marot, for small groups of these poems alternate with chapters that run all over the map of language and thought.
Not merely a set of translations of one poem, Le Ton beau de Marot is an autobiographical essay, a love letter to the French language, a series of musings on life, loss, and death, a sweet bouquet of stirring poetry—but most of all, it celebrates the limitless creativity fired by a passion for the music of words.
Dozens of literary themes and creations are woven into the picture, including Pushkin's Eugene Onegin , Dante's Inferno, Salinger's Catcher in the Rye , Villon's Ballades, Nabokov’s essays, Georges Perec's La Disparition, Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, Horace's odes, and more.
Rife with stunning form-content interplay, crammed with creative linguistic experiments yet always crystal-clear, this book is meant not only for lovers of literature, but also for people who wish to be brought into contact with current ideas about how creativity works, and who wish to see how today’s computational models of language and thought stack up next to the human mind.
Le Ton beau de Marot is a sparkling, personal, and poetic exploration aimed at both the literary and the scientific world, and is sure to provoke great excitement and heated controversy among poets and translators, critics and writers, and those involved in the study of creativity and its elusive wellsprings.
Le ton beau de Marot” literally means ”The sweet tone of Marot”, but to a French ear it suggests ”Le tombeau de Marot”—that is, ”The tomb of Marot”. That double entendre foreshadows the linguistic exuberance of this book, which was sparked a decade ago when Hofstadter, under the spell of an exquisite French miniature by Marot, got hooked on the challenge of recreating both its sweet message and its tight rhymes in English—jumping through two tough hoops at once. In the next few years, he not only did many of his own translations of Marot's poem, but also enlisted friends, students, colleagues, family, noted poets, and translators—even three state-of-the-art translation programs!—to try their hand at this subtle challenge.
The rich harvest is represented here by 88 wildly diverse variations on Marot's little theme. Yet this barely scratches the surface of Le Ton beau de Marot, for small groups of these poems alternate with chapters that run all over the map of language and thought.
Not merely a set of translations of one poem, Le Ton beau de Marot is an autobiographical essay, a love letter to the French language, a series of musings on life, loss, and death, a sweet bouquet of stirring poetry—but most of all, it celebrates the limitless creativity fired by a passion for the music of words.
Dozens of literary themes and creations are woven into the picture, including Pushkin's Eugene Onegin , Dante's Inferno, Salinger's Catcher in the Rye , Villon's Ballades, Nabokov’s essays, Georges Perec's La Disparition, Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, Horace's odes, and more.
Rife with stunning form-content interplay, crammed with creative linguistic experiments yet always crystal-clear, this book is meant not only for lovers of literature, but also for people who wish to be brought into contact with current ideas about how creativity works, and who wish to see how today’s computational models of language and thought stack up next to the human mind.
Le Ton beau de Marot is a sparkling, personal, and poetic exploration aimed at both the literary and the scientific world, and is sure to provoke great excitement and heated controversy among poets and translators, critics and writers, and those involved in the study of creativity and its elusive wellsprings.
632 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
108 people are currently reading
2770 people want to read
About the author
Douglas R. Hofstadter
45 books2,341 followersDouglas Richard Hofstadter is an American scholar of cognitive science, physics, and comparative literature whose research focuses on consciousness, thinking and creativity. He is best known for his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, first published in 1979, for which he was awarded the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction.
Hofstadter is the son of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Hofstadter. Douglas grew up on the campus of Stanford University, where his father was a professor. Douglas attended the International School of Geneva for a year. He graduated with Distinction in Mathematics from Stanford in 1965. He spent a few years in Sweden in the mid 1960s. He continued his education and received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Oregon in 1975.
Hofstadter is College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he directs the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition which consists of himself and his graduate students, forming the "Fluid Analogies Research Group" (FARG). He was initially appointed to the Indiana University's Computer Science Department faculty in 1977, and at that time he launched his research program in computer modeling of mental processes (which at that time he called "artificial intelligence research", a label that he has since dropped in favor of "cognitive science research"). In 1984, he moved to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he was hired as a professor of psychology and was also appointed to the Walgreen Chair for the Study of Human Understanding. In 1988 he returned to Bloomington as "College of Arts and Sciences Professor" in both Cognitive Science and Computer Science, and also was appointed Adjunct Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and Psychology, but he states that his involvement with most of these departments is nominal.
In April, 2009, Hofstadter was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Member of the American Philosophical Society.
Hofstadter's many interests include music, visual art, the mind, creativity, consciousness, self-reference, translation and mathematics. He has numerous recursive sequences and geometric constructions named after him.
At the University of Michigan and Indiana University, he co-authored, with Melanie Mitchell, a computational model of "high-level perception" — Copycat — and several other models of analogy-making and cognition. The Copycat project was subsequently extended under the name "Metacat" by Hofstadter's doctoral student James Marshall. The Letter Spirit project, implemented by Gary McGraw and John Rehling, aims to model the act of artistic creativity by designing stylistically uniform "gridfonts" (typefaces limited to a grid). Other more recent models are Phaeaco (implemented by Harry Foundalis) and SeqSee (Abhijit Mahabal), which model high-level perception and analogy-making in the microdomains of Bongard problems and number sequences, respectively.
Hofstadter collects and studies cognitive errors (largely, but not solely, speech errors), "bon mots" (spontaneous humorous quips), and analogies of all sorts, and his long-time observation of these diverse products of cognition, and his theories about the mechanisms that underlie them, have exerted a powerful influence on the architectures of the computational models developed by himself and FARG members.
All FARG computational models share certain key principles, among which are: that human thinking is carried out by thousands of independent small actions in parallel, biased by the concepts that are currently activated; that activation spreads from activated concepts to less activated "neighbor concepts"; that there is a "mental temperature" that regulates the degree of randomness in the parallel activity; that promising avenues tend to be explored more rapidly than unpromising ones. F
Hofstadter is the son of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Hofstadter. Douglas grew up on the campus of Stanford University, where his father was a professor. Douglas attended the International School of Geneva for a year. He graduated with Distinction in Mathematics from Stanford in 1965. He spent a few years in Sweden in the mid 1960s. He continued his education and received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Oregon in 1975.
Hofstadter is College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he directs the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition which consists of himself and his graduate students, forming the "Fluid Analogies Research Group" (FARG). He was initially appointed to the Indiana University's Computer Science Department faculty in 1977, and at that time he launched his research program in computer modeling of mental processes (which at that time he called "artificial intelligence research", a label that he has since dropped in favor of "cognitive science research"). In 1984, he moved to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he was hired as a professor of psychology and was also appointed to the Walgreen Chair for the Study of Human Understanding. In 1988 he returned to Bloomington as "College of Arts and Sciences Professor" in both Cognitive Science and Computer Science, and also was appointed Adjunct Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and Psychology, but he states that his involvement with most of these departments is nominal.
In April, 2009, Hofstadter was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Member of the American Philosophical Society.
Hofstadter's many interests include music, visual art, the mind, creativity, consciousness, self-reference, translation and mathematics. He has numerous recursive sequences and geometric constructions named after him.
At the University of Michigan and Indiana University, he co-authored, with Melanie Mitchell, a computational model of "high-level perception" — Copycat — and several other models of analogy-making and cognition. The Copycat project was subsequently extended under the name "Metacat" by Hofstadter's doctoral student James Marshall. The Letter Spirit project, implemented by Gary McGraw and John Rehling, aims to model the act of artistic creativity by designing stylistically uniform "gridfonts" (typefaces limited to a grid). Other more recent models are Phaeaco (implemented by Harry Foundalis) and SeqSee (Abhijit Mahabal), which model high-level perception and analogy-making in the microdomains of Bongard problems and number sequences, respectively.
Hofstadter collects and studies cognitive errors (largely, but not solely, speech errors), "bon mots" (spontaneous humorous quips), and analogies of all sorts, and his long-time observation of these diverse products of cognition, and his theories about the mechanisms that underlie them, have exerted a powerful influence on the architectures of the computational models developed by himself and FARG members.
All FARG computational models share certain key principles, among which are: that human thinking is carried out by thousands of independent small actions in parallel, biased by the concepts that are currently activated; that activation spreads from activated concepts to less activated "neighbor concepts"; that there is a "mental temperature" that regulates the degree of randomness in the parallel activity; that promising avenues tend to be explored more rapidly than unpromising ones. F
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 109 reviews
December 18, 2013
Le ton beau
de Marot —
Quite a read.
You won’t speed
Through this book.
Take a look,
Word lovers.
‘Tween its covers,
Poems, songs,
Thoughts thereon,
Make it full.
Beautiful-
ly typeset.
Author gets
How frames blend
As words wend
Through the brain.
Can’t explain
Why it’s great
But to state
Professeur
Hofstadter’s
Writing’s good.
So I would
Recommend,
(To friends, lend)
Le ton beau
de Marot.
de Marot —
Quite a read.
You won’t speed
Through this book.
Take a look,
Word lovers.
‘Tween its covers,
Poems, songs,
Thoughts thereon,
Make it full.
Beautiful-
ly typeset.
Author gets
How frames blend
As words wend
Through the brain.
Can’t explain
Why it’s great
But to state
Professeur
Hofstadter’s
Writing’s good.
So I would
Recommend,
(To friends, lend)
Le ton beau
de Marot.
June 6, 2018
In which Hofstadter attempts to bottle lightning a second time. But where Gödel, Escher, Bach excelled in its loose and free-associative style, in its detailed probing of diverse disciplines, which become interrelated in surprising an interesting ways, Le Ton Beau De Marot feels like a deep dive into a comparatively shallow pool. Hofstadter bottoms-out fairly quickly, and spends a lot of time treading water, paddling aimlessly in great circles. The subject matter (or at least the author’s treatment of it) does not justify this level of detail.
That’s not to say that Le Ton Beau De Marot doesn’t contain a host of fascinating insights into the wonders of language and translation – it absolutely does, and for these the book is worth reading. But it is heavily mired in the author’s self-indulgences. The book is deeply autobiographical – frustratingly so. It is bogged down with endless personal anecdotes, many of which are only tangentially related to the subject at hand (If you open the book to just about any random page, you will find it heavily peppered with the pronoun “I”). Frankly, most of these vignettes are not particularly interesting, and make the author seem self-absorbed. It’s unfortunate, but what primarily came across to me in this book was not a love of language, but a writer in love with the sound of his own words and thoughts.
That’s not to say that Le Ton Beau De Marot doesn’t contain a host of fascinating insights into the wonders of language and translation – it absolutely does, and for these the book is worth reading. But it is heavily mired in the author’s self-indulgences. The book is deeply autobiographical – frustratingly so. It is bogged down with endless personal anecdotes, many of which are only tangentially related to the subject at hand (If you open the book to just about any random page, you will find it heavily peppered with the pronoun “I”). Frankly, most of these vignettes are not particularly interesting, and make the author seem self-absorbed. It’s unfortunate, but what primarily came across to me in this book was not a love of language, but a writer in love with the sound of his own words and thoughts.
November 11, 2007
Another one of my all-time favorite books, this is by the author of "Godel, Escher, Bach". Impossible to categorize accurately, it's a kind of extended riff on the difficulties and challenges of translation, carried out with a kind of beguiling enthusiasm. It shares the playfulness that characterized "Godel, Escher, Bach" but I found it more accessible and more interesting.
Starting with a single unifying thread that winds through the entire book (various* translations of a single 28-line poem by the French author Clement Marot, Hofstadter weaves a fascinating tapestry about the challenges facing a translator. There is a whole chapter dedicated to translations of Eugene Onegin; another discusses various efforts at translating Dante. Along the way there are fun digressions about such challenges as translating lipograms (text written with the constraint that one or more letters of the alphabet are never used), the paradoxical usefulness of writing under constraints of various kinds, be they artificial as in lipogrammatic writing, or metrical constraints, as in Pushkin, Dante, or the sonnets of Shakespeare, difficulties in writing translation software, linguistic issues such as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis**, how one would translate a 'dirty' joke to a clean version, while preserving the humor.
*: I haven't counted, but there must be at least 50 different translations. Oddly enough, the accumulation of so many is not boring, but fascinating - Hofstadter's boyish enthusiasm helps to charm.
**: (very) roughly, the linguistic notion that how we think is constrained by language. Dismissed by Steven Pinker in his book "The Language Instinct", though I think Pinker's case is less than convincing.
A fascinating tour-de-force, it is also the kind of book one can dip in to from time to time and be entertained by any one of its chapters.
Starting with a single unifying thread that winds through the entire book (various* translations of a single 28-line poem by the French author Clement Marot, Hofstadter weaves a fascinating tapestry about the challenges facing a translator. There is a whole chapter dedicated to translations of Eugene Onegin; another discusses various efforts at translating Dante. Along the way there are fun digressions about such challenges as translating lipograms (text written with the constraint that one or more letters of the alphabet are never used), the paradoxical usefulness of writing under constraints of various kinds, be they artificial as in lipogrammatic writing, or metrical constraints, as in Pushkin, Dante, or the sonnets of Shakespeare, difficulties in writing translation software, linguistic issues such as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis**, how one would translate a 'dirty' joke to a clean version, while preserving the humor.
*: I haven't counted, but there must be at least 50 different translations. Oddly enough, the accumulation of so many is not boring, but fascinating - Hofstadter's boyish enthusiasm helps to charm.
**: (very) roughly, the linguistic notion that how we think is constrained by language. Dismissed by Steven Pinker in his book "The Language Instinct", though I think Pinker's case is less than convincing.
A fascinating tour-de-force, it is also the kind of book one can dip in to from time to time and be entertained by any one of its chapters.
May 12, 2010
(addition 5/12/2010)
I would mark this book six stars, if I could. This was my third (or fourth? Or fifth?) trip through, and I still think it's amazing, brilliant, quirky and fun. Basically, it asks: What should stay constant across translation of a work? Translation is normally thought of as to do with plot, mood, connotations of individual words – but what about rhyming, scansion, lipogrammatic constraints? Is transculturation a thing to avoid, or to work toward? If your various constraints conflict, how do you pick which to follow?
You can dip into it at any random point and find lots and lots of fascinating tidbits about words, history, authors, AI, how humor works, musical analogy, analogous musings, stylistic analysis of writing, and so on. You'll want to play along, too – as I did for this discussion! (Hint: it's in "Anglo-Saxon.")
(Previous review)
This is one of my favorite books ever, and as I just recommended it to someone I thought I'd put it here as well. Hofstadter's examination of translation and transformation taught me that the best translation is not necessarily the most literal one, nor even the one that captures the most exact meaning, and that transformation of text is indeed a creative activity. (Heh - I read this before I even heard of fanfiction!) There are a lot of thoughtful ideas in here about how humans use language - how stories and poems are bigger than just the words in them, how meaning is only one dimension of text. Perhaps it's not as groundbreaking as his "Goedel, Escher, Bach," but it's more approachable for non-computer-science types, I think, and I like it better.
I would mark this book six stars, if I could. This was my third (or fourth? Or fifth?) trip through, and I still think it's amazing, brilliant, quirky and fun. Basically, it asks: What should stay constant across translation of a work? Translation is normally thought of as to do with plot, mood, connotations of individual words – but what about rhyming, scansion, lipogrammatic constraints? Is transculturation a thing to avoid, or to work toward? If your various constraints conflict, how do you pick which to follow?
You can dip into it at any random point and find lots and lots of fascinating tidbits about words, history, authors, AI, how humor works, musical analogy, analogous musings, stylistic analysis of writing, and so on. You'll want to play along, too – as I did for this discussion! (Hint: it's in "Anglo-Saxon.")
(Previous review)
This is one of my favorite books ever, and as I just recommended it to someone I thought I'd put it here as well. Hofstadter's examination of translation and transformation taught me that the best translation is not necessarily the most literal one, nor even the one that captures the most exact meaning, and that transformation of text is indeed a creative activity. (Heh - I read this before I even heard of fanfiction!) There are a lot of thoughtful ideas in here about how humans use language - how stories and poems are bigger than just the words in them, how meaning is only one dimension of text. Perhaps it's not as groundbreaking as his "Goedel, Escher, Bach," but it's more approachable for non-computer-science types, I think, and I like it better.
August 12, 2014
Count me among those who regard Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid as a masterpiece. Le Ton beau, however, is Hofstadter gone overboard. Wow, does the man need an editor. This book is so exasperating: occasional drips of insight interspersed with ramblings, ephemera, and juvenile verse, all in the name of exploring as many aspects of language translation problems as may have occurred to the author during an artificially prolonged compositional process.
That last is Hofstadter's armslength observation, not my assumption. The author begins his work with irrelevant poignancy by telling us that the recent death of his beloved wife was what prompted this writing. It's an oddment of shared intimacy, as the book can scarcely be considered an homage to her her interests or accomplishments. If anything, the matter-of-fact dedication leaves the impression that Hofstadter used this book as an excuse to escape, sublimate, or suppress his grief for as long as possible.
So he talks in his prologue about holing himself up in a bungalow for more than a year, alienating himself from the company of others to endlessly rewrite and reorganize chapters and sections as new ideas occur to him. Far less than impress, it conjures the tragic image of a man in denial essentially orphaning his school-age children at what must have been their moment of greatest emotional vulnerability. It's a confession that casts a pall over the casual tone of the book as a whole, not to mention its sprawl. Your father has gone bye-bye, kids, you'll just have to salvage whatever you can find to eat in the fridge.
To make matters worse, the work's substance is not nearly worthy of its backstory. Ton Beau's foundational intellectual conceit is the challenge of properly translating poetry and exploring what if anything properly means in this context. So Hofstadter dissects Clement Marot's poetic bon-bon Ma Mignonne (reproduced in full on the book's cover), taking it through multiple variations -- some by others, but most by himself -- to demonstrate the ultimate futility of any exercise to generate a perfect reproduction of any poem in another language... Hofstadter defines the perfect translation as an identical copy of the rhyme, meter, syntax, quanta of syllables, assonance, consonance, and semantic substance, with neither addition nor subtraction.
Of course, any change is tautologically incommensurate with identity; you don't need to read all the examples to grasp this concept any more than you need to read his largely vacuous line-by-line annotations/explanations of what he thinks each translator has done well or poorly. About five well-chosen samples would have sufficed to get his point across, and a good editor might well have come in handy here. Unfortunately this author refuses to be edited, even going so far as to alert the reader with self-conscious pride that he insists on full control of his work, to the point of delivering untouchable, pre-typeset manuscripts including all selections of fonts, kerning, and font size.
As much an act of obsessive-compulsive behavior as hubris, Hofstadter nonetheless manages to marble a bit of thought-provoking meat in the midst of this mountain of fat. Among the ideas Hofstadter tosses out are:
- On languages as independent structures such that disparate languages even those from neighboring regions do not form a topologically-pure continuum (p. 345). "An expressive structure created in French will not just continuously transform like a piece of rubber being stretched or bent into the equivalent structure in German. Rather ... the fragments must be put back together in radically different ways... each one analogous to the choice of an item from a restaurant menu so huge that one can never scan all of it...." All translations therefore require conscious choice and selection.
- The challenge of translating language-dependent literature, considering the futility of creating a word-for-word translation of a Stanislaw Lem story about a machine that destroys all things beginning with the letter 'n' including science (na'uk in Polish), there being no English word with the same meaning beginning with 'n' (p. 56).
- The fact that connotations evolve over time, considering the gender of hypothetical people referenced as "you guys" (pp. 20-23). Does a translator render a text in its original or current temporal context and to which context in the target language?
- The problem of layered meanings, an especially vexing issue for would-be translators of poetry (pp. 81-82). What to do with puns, grammatical errors, syntactical ambiguities, and other wordplay?
- The meaning of meaning itself as something ineffable "where even the tiniest epsilon... is not identical to zero" (p. 519). Here it's worth quoting Hofstadter at length to point up his hobbyhorses.
John Searle is the philosopher whose writings Hofstadter goes to extraordinary lengths to vilify, and in doing so offers a neat takedown of the "Chinese Room" (a box in which a non-Chinese speaker manages to render perfect English translations simply by following detailed, written instructions). Whence the intelligence in this design? Of course it lies in the original authorship of the impeccable instructions and the ability to faithfully follow them, appreciating that doing so in a reasonable time actually requires impractically vast reference materials and the superhuman speed to navigate them. Okay, but why reproduce Searle's essay in "Anglo-Saxon" (for Hofstadter, this is English stripped of any word containing the letter "E") to make the argument? Sure, it's a neat stunt -- I loved Gilbert Adair's masterful translation of Georges Perec's La Disparition (see A Void) -- but it doesn't enhance his critique. Rather it presents one more example here of an otherwise brilliant thinker who has apparently lost his mind.
That last is Hofstadter's armslength observation, not my assumption. The author begins his work with irrelevant poignancy by telling us that the recent death of his beloved wife was what prompted this writing. It's an oddment of shared intimacy, as the book can scarcely be considered an homage to her her interests or accomplishments. If anything, the matter-of-fact dedication leaves the impression that Hofstadter used this book as an excuse to escape, sublimate, or suppress his grief for as long as possible.
So he talks in his prologue about holing himself up in a bungalow for more than a year, alienating himself from the company of others to endlessly rewrite and reorganize chapters and sections as new ideas occur to him. Far less than impress, it conjures the tragic image of a man in denial essentially orphaning his school-age children at what must have been their moment of greatest emotional vulnerability. It's a confession that casts a pall over the casual tone of the book as a whole, not to mention its sprawl. Your father has gone bye-bye, kids, you'll just have to salvage whatever you can find to eat in the fridge.
To make matters worse, the work's substance is not nearly worthy of its backstory. Ton Beau's foundational intellectual conceit is the challenge of properly translating poetry and exploring what if anything properly means in this context. So Hofstadter dissects Clement Marot's poetic bon-bon Ma Mignonne (reproduced in full on the book's cover), taking it through multiple variations -- some by others, but most by himself -- to demonstrate the ultimate futility of any exercise to generate a perfect reproduction of any poem in another language... Hofstadter defines the perfect translation as an identical copy of the rhyme, meter, syntax, quanta of syllables, assonance, consonance, and semantic substance, with neither addition nor subtraction.
Of course, any change is tautologically incommensurate with identity; you don't need to read all the examples to grasp this concept any more than you need to read his largely vacuous line-by-line annotations/explanations of what he thinks each translator has done well or poorly. About five well-chosen samples would have sufficed to get his point across, and a good editor might well have come in handy here. Unfortunately this author refuses to be edited, even going so far as to alert the reader with self-conscious pride that he insists on full control of his work, to the point of delivering untouchable, pre-typeset manuscripts including all selections of fonts, kerning, and font size.
As much an act of obsessive-compulsive behavior as hubris, Hofstadter nonetheless manages to marble a bit of thought-provoking meat in the midst of this mountain of fat. Among the ideas Hofstadter tosses out are:
- On languages as independent structures such that disparate languages even those from neighboring regions do not form a topologically-pure continuum (p. 345). "An expressive structure created in French will not just continuously transform like a piece of rubber being stretched or bent into the equivalent structure in German. Rather ... the fragments must be put back together in radically different ways... each one analogous to the choice of an item from a restaurant menu so huge that one can never scan all of it...." All translations therefore require conscious choice and selection.
- The challenge of translating language-dependent literature, considering the futility of creating a word-for-word translation of a Stanislaw Lem story about a machine that destroys all things beginning with the letter 'n' including science (na'uk in Polish), there being no English word with the same meaning beginning with 'n' (p. 56).
- The fact that connotations evolve over time, considering the gender of hypothetical people referenced as "you guys" (pp. 20-23). Does a translator render a text in its original or current temporal context and to which context in the target language?
- The problem of layered meanings, an especially vexing issue for would-be translators of poetry (pp. 81-82). What to do with puns, grammatical errors, syntactical ambiguities, and other wordplay?
- The meaning of meaning itself as something ineffable "where even the tiniest epsilon... is not identical to zero" (p. 519). Here it's worth quoting Hofstadter at length to point up his hobbyhorses.
[T]he quest to develop an artificially intelligent entity is a marvelous, mystical quest, in which we are brought face to face with the deepest enigmas concerning our own nature. What is language? What is music? What are concepts? What are words? What is thinking? What is insight? How does analogy work? What is memory? How do we learn? How do we forget? How are mistakes linked to invention? What is perception? What is consciousness? What is creativity? What is artistic beauty? How do we mirror other minds inside our own? What are empathy and compassion? How does a soul come out of inanimate matter? What is a self? What does the word "I" represent?Hofstadter poses these questions to defend the validity of exploring and developing AI in the context of a critique of a philosopher's thought experiment without once considering the applications of information theory that have made such explorations possible. The author touches upon the reductio ad absurdam of chatbots and thesaurus-powered mechanical translators, but never thinks to mention the works and successfully applied theories of Claude Shannon or Ed Thorp.
John Searle is the philosopher whose writings Hofstadter goes to extraordinary lengths to vilify, and in doing so offers a neat takedown of the "Chinese Room" (a box in which a non-Chinese speaker manages to render perfect English translations simply by following detailed, written instructions). Whence the intelligence in this design? Of course it lies in the original authorship of the impeccable instructions and the ability to faithfully follow them, appreciating that doing so in a reasonable time actually requires impractically vast reference materials and the superhuman speed to navigate them. Okay, but why reproduce Searle's essay in "Anglo-Saxon" (for Hofstadter, this is English stripped of any word containing the letter "E") to make the argument? Sure, it's a neat stunt -- I loved Gilbert Adair's masterful translation of Georges Perec's La Disparition (see A Void) -- but it doesn't enhance his critique. Rather it presents one more example here of an otherwise brilliant thinker who has apparently lost his mind.
September 28, 2007
Perfect for total compulsives, among whom I number myself when it comes to language. One of my favorite details of this book is when Hofstadter admits that he rewrote pages over and over again so that they would end in a happy place physically--that is, not only no widows or orphans (a huge no-no from my stance), but many pages end with the end of a sentence. It's also witty, light, insightful about translation from many different views of that task, a little bit sad, personal but not stupid, well-designed, and smart. Plus, if you don't have the urge to do your own translation (or a couple) after finishing it, you have a dead soul. The late Hugh Kenner contributes one of my favorites, which includes an awesome visual pun on Rx.
July 1, 2025
have maybe never read anything so pretentious & self-indulgent, and also have maybe never read anything so beautiful & life-affirming. You never know I guess :)
September 11, 2013
Some fascinating insights on the difficulty of translation, along with examples showing that apparently untranslatable texts often aren't. "Borges thinks you should try a little harder." (p. 539)
Hofstadter interleaves a variety of surprising sample texts with reflections on his life with his recently deceased wife and with extended attacks on the work of John Searle and Vladimir Nabokov.
Hofstadter says interesting things, many of them several times each. When you have won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction, it is probably harder to find an editor who can advise you to shorten your new book by 75-100 pages, but it would have been worth the trouble in this case. I was charmed by the poem "A une Damoyselle malade" by Clément Marot -- the translation of which inspires the present book -- when I first saw it, but now I don't want to see it again for at least five years.
[Edit:] By the way, you can see the poem in French, and judge how hard it might be to translate, here.
Hofstadter interleaves a variety of surprising sample texts with reflections on his life with his recently deceased wife and with extended attacks on the work of John Searle and Vladimir Nabokov.
Hofstadter says interesting things, many of them several times each. When you have won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction, it is probably harder to find an editor who can advise you to shorten your new book by 75-100 pages, but it would have been worth the trouble in this case. I was charmed by the poem "A une Damoyselle malade" by Clément Marot -- the translation of which inspires the present book -- when I first saw it, but now I don't want to see it again for at least five years.
[Edit:] By the way, you can see the poem in French, and judge how hard it might be to translate, here.
July 2, 2025
For being in "praise" of the music of language, Hofstadter spends a lot of time intransigently denigrating things he doesn't like, from critics of AI, translators, German, free verse poetry, and rock n roll. But when he's not knee-deep in old-timer fogey-ism, he makes some deeply profound and piercing remarks about the nature of language and the difficulties of translation and comprehension.
November 1, 2023
Thought provoking, entertaining, infuriating, brilliant, contradictory, frustrating, fascinating, tedious, hilarious, exhausting, delightful.
My favorite thing about this book is how good Hofstadter is at convincing me about things he himself disagrees with.
I bought a second copy before I even finished this because I'm going to force it on someone so I have someone to talk about it with.
My favorite thing about this book is how good Hofstadter is at convincing me about things he himself disagrees with.
I bought a second copy before I even finished this because I'm going to force it on someone so I have someone to talk about it with.
Read
August 18, 2007I really can't say anything about this book that hasn't already been said. This is the more organic and human sequel to GEB, much denser and more complex, takes forever to read, and is deeply moving and personal in a way the whimsy of GEB never gets. A book for GEB lovers to read when they get out of college.
Want to read
June 30, 2009I kind of can't wait to clasp my grubby hands on this book.
May 25, 2019
This book wasn’t really what I was looking for. I find choosing between prose translations really interesting, and I wanted discussion of the challenges faced there (of which there are plenty)! Instead, this book focused more on poetry translation, and other types of translation that are more challenging than prose. Hofstadter mentioned briefly that even translating prose is no easy challenge, but gave almost no attention to it.
I still enjoyed the book for what it was though, and it has changed my views on poetry translation significantly. Before, I thought it was effectively not worth attempting. The ideas from the original will not fit into the same meter and rhyme scheme in the target language, so why bother? If a reader is willing to learn the pronunciation of the source language, they might enjoy a literal translation paired side-by-side with the original. And if a poet comes across a poetic technique in another language, e.g. a distinctive rhyme scheme, they might be inspired to use a similar technique in a new poem in a new language. But trying to “recreate the experience” of reading the original in some target language just seemed hopeless to me,
Hofstadter convinced me it is possible, though, by showing some examples. He quoted excerpts from some particularly amazing translations of Pushkin’s Onegin and Dante’s Divine Comedy. Even though I don’t speak the original languages, it was obvious by comparing to other translations that the basic meaning had been kept intact. My thinking is still a lot different from Hofstadter’s. I still think footnotes for difficult to translate pieces of larger works (e.g. puns) make sense, whereas Hofstadter views such footnotes as cop-outs to the extreme and often prefers “translations” that I don’t find remotely true to the original. Overall, though, he convinced me to think a lot more closely to his views than I did before.
Amusingly, even though I was very impressed with many of the translations Hofstadter quoted, I almost always hated his own translations, which he included in abundance. For many of them, including probably every single translation he did of “Ma Mignonne,” I thought I would have preferred to never read any translation than to read his. (Except his literal translation. That one was invaluable in helping me understand the original, which I found quite charming.) This distracted me from his thesis for quite some time, because every time he held up one of his own translations as an example of how translation *should* be done, I became more convinced of my prior views that such translations were not worth doing. I found it surprising how much more closely our tastes aligned on other people’s translations than his own. I think it’s just evidence of how much easier it is to criticize than create. (And no, I didn’t think I could do better than any of his translations I liked so little!)
In true Hofstadter form, he included lots of tangents of varying interest. I don’t see why I should have to wade through descriptions of AI research from the 60s to get to the parts on translation! Also, I understand he put a lot of effort into details like font selection where page breaks occur, but that is no excuse for refusing to allow a Kindle version. As the reader, I should get to choose whether the convenience of the Kindle is more important to me than those details. (Very much yes!) But the book was interesting enough to put up with such hardships.
I still enjoyed the book for what it was though, and it has changed my views on poetry translation significantly. Before, I thought it was effectively not worth attempting. The ideas from the original will not fit into the same meter and rhyme scheme in the target language, so why bother? If a reader is willing to learn the pronunciation of the source language, they might enjoy a literal translation paired side-by-side with the original. And if a poet comes across a poetic technique in another language, e.g. a distinctive rhyme scheme, they might be inspired to use a similar technique in a new poem in a new language. But trying to “recreate the experience” of reading the original in some target language just seemed hopeless to me,
Hofstadter convinced me it is possible, though, by showing some examples. He quoted excerpts from some particularly amazing translations of Pushkin’s Onegin and Dante’s Divine Comedy. Even though I don’t speak the original languages, it was obvious by comparing to other translations that the basic meaning had been kept intact. My thinking is still a lot different from Hofstadter’s. I still think footnotes for difficult to translate pieces of larger works (e.g. puns) make sense, whereas Hofstadter views such footnotes as cop-outs to the extreme and often prefers “translations” that I don’t find remotely true to the original. Overall, though, he convinced me to think a lot more closely to his views than I did before.
Amusingly, even though I was very impressed with many of the translations Hofstadter quoted, I almost always hated his own translations, which he included in abundance. For many of them, including probably every single translation he did of “Ma Mignonne,” I thought I would have preferred to never read any translation than to read his. (Except his literal translation. That one was invaluable in helping me understand the original, which I found quite charming.) This distracted me from his thesis for quite some time, because every time he held up one of his own translations as an example of how translation *should* be done, I became more convinced of my prior views that such translations were not worth doing. I found it surprising how much more closely our tastes aligned on other people’s translations than his own. I think it’s just evidence of how much easier it is to criticize than create. (And no, I didn’t think I could do better than any of his translations I liked so little!)
In true Hofstadter form, he included lots of tangents of varying interest. I don’t see why I should have to wade through descriptions of AI research from the 60s to get to the parts on translation! Also, I understand he put a lot of effort into details like font selection where page breaks occur, but that is no excuse for refusing to allow a Kindle version. As the reader, I should get to choose whether the convenience of the Kindle is more important to me than those details. (Very much yes!) But the book was interesting enough to put up with such hardships.
November 6, 2010
Covers many very interesting topics, such as language, translation, and machine learning, yet was really hard to get through because it meanders on too long on each one.
Though I skimmed some chapters, I'm glad I pushed all the way through, because it led me to a realization. He had the same realization, so I'll quote: "It was my own love for elegant structure that attracted me to poetry ... and yet ironically, for decades I considered myself to be ... a non-lover of poetry, someone baffled and mystified by poetry.... I have finally arrived at a different conclusion, however: that I am a lover of poetry, that there is much bad poetry in the world, that much of it is nonetheless highly touted, and that my not being able to relate to highly-touted bad stuff cowed me into thinking I was a philistine."
Since I started this book mainly because I was interested in the topic of translation, I was surprised to come away with such a renewed interest in poetry.
I won't take any shots at anyone who enjoys free verse. But for me, as for Hofstadter, what makes poetry interesting is being able to actually hear the effects of the constraints of rhyme and rhythm and syllable counts while still being able to easily understand the literal meaning of the text. The words shouldn't be too obscure and the syntax can't be twisted and distorted very far just to fit the rhyme. It is hard work to write poetry that works that way. Yet when it succeeds, it looks so easy in comparison to the serious poetry, that the achievement is too often overlooked.
Maybe this is the mathematician/scientist/programmer in me that loves clear structure. But that is who I am and it colors what I like in music and art as well. Our way of looking at things is different from, say, the composers of the romantic era or poets of free verse, but just as valid. Just as minimalism has brought back audible patterns to serious music, I hope for a re-birth of audible patterns in serious poetry.
What was most illuminating were the many side-by-side excerpts from four different translations of Eugene Onegin into English. They were presented first without naming the translators and without saying which were the ones most highly praised. Just like the author, I came to find that only one of them really worked. It had the right rhythm and rhyme and most importantly was clearly understandable. It turns out to be the translation by James Falen, and that is surely the one I will read if I ever decide to tackle Onegin.
A serious bit of editing could have improved this book. The author admits to adding and subtracting text for the sole purpose of making page boundaries line-up the way he wants, and I suspect that is part of what makes this book such a slog; he will insert superfluous text here and there just to push the chapter-break down half a page. I have myself when using LaTeX given-in to the temptation to play such games with the text. But just as following the constraints of sonnet form, for example, can force some to twist their language out of shape, these constraints forced the author to pad sections that would have been better without it.
Though I skimmed some chapters, I'm glad I pushed all the way through, because it led me to a realization. He had the same realization, so I'll quote: "It was my own love for elegant structure that attracted me to poetry ... and yet ironically, for decades I considered myself to be ... a non-lover of poetry, someone baffled and mystified by poetry.... I have finally arrived at a different conclusion, however: that I am a lover of poetry, that there is much bad poetry in the world, that much of it is nonetheless highly touted, and that my not being able to relate to highly-touted bad stuff cowed me into thinking I was a philistine."
Since I started this book mainly because I was interested in the topic of translation, I was surprised to come away with such a renewed interest in poetry.
I won't take any shots at anyone who enjoys free verse. But for me, as for Hofstadter, what makes poetry interesting is being able to actually hear the effects of the constraints of rhyme and rhythm and syllable counts while still being able to easily understand the literal meaning of the text. The words shouldn't be too obscure and the syntax can't be twisted and distorted very far just to fit the rhyme. It is hard work to write poetry that works that way. Yet when it succeeds, it looks so easy in comparison to the serious poetry, that the achievement is too often overlooked.
Maybe this is the mathematician/scientist/programmer in me that loves clear structure. But that is who I am and it colors what I like in music and art as well. Our way of looking at things is different from, say, the composers of the romantic era or poets of free verse, but just as valid. Just as minimalism has brought back audible patterns to serious music, I hope for a re-birth of audible patterns in serious poetry.
What was most illuminating were the many side-by-side excerpts from four different translations of Eugene Onegin into English. They were presented first without naming the translators and without saying which were the ones most highly praised. Just like the author, I came to find that only one of them really worked. It had the right rhythm and rhyme and most importantly was clearly understandable. It turns out to be the translation by James Falen, and that is surely the one I will read if I ever decide to tackle Onegin.
A serious bit of editing could have improved this book. The author admits to adding and subtracting text for the sole purpose of making page boundaries line-up the way he wants, and I suspect that is part of what makes this book such a slog; he will insert superfluous text here and there just to push the chapter-break down half a page. I have myself when using LaTeX given-in to the temptation to play such games with the text. But just as following the constraints of sonnet form, for example, can force some to twist their language out of shape, these constraints forced the author to pad sections that would have been better without it.
July 27, 2012
Douglas Hofstadter wrote a full length (and then some!) book related to the topic of poetry translation: Le Ton Beau De Marot: In praise of the music of Language. I am only about half way through this long volume, but over and over run across observations or declarations that I find fascinating. This is a volume that is nearly as massive in its conception as Goedel, Escher Bach, written much later in his life, incorporating more mature and collectively honed ideas about language, formal media, translation, the hopelessness of machine translation, and grief, all built around a 500 year-old piece of short French verse and dozens of diverse translations. Knowing French better than I would be a bonus. He quotes and comments on verse written in a language distinguished from English by completely avoiding the vowel "e" (which he calls Anglo-Saxon), or a language differing from Italian by excluding all the words that contain consonants other than L and
T. (in which a short version of "Lolita" has been written in verse). Can you translate such a poem into or out of such a language? Is the "meaning" dependent on the form? How lame would a Google translation be, oblivious to the formal elements of the original language? Some people will find it tedious, but I think you will find delightful passages often enough to carry you through the slow bits. I am finding it so.
Have you ever come across this odd poem?
Read it and see if you can figure out what makes it
seem a bit awkward, besides its irregular meter:
Washington Crossing the Delaware
A hard, howling, tossing water scene.
Strong tide was washing hero clean.
"How cold!" Weather stings as in anger.
O Silent night shows war ace danger!
The cold waters swashing on in rage.
Redcoats warn slow his hint engage.
When star general's action wish'd "Go!"
He saw his ragged continentals row.
Ah, he stands - sailor crew went going.
And so this general watches rowing.
He hastens - winter again grows cold.
A wet crew gain Hessian stronghold.
George can't lose war with's hands in;
He's astern - so go alight, crew, and win!
David Shulman, 1936
This poem was is one of the ones quoted in this Hofstadter book, and it's one that would be hard to imagine translating faithfully into another language, since in addition to whatever the content is or appears to be, and the standard sonnet rhyme scheme, you might have noticed that each line is an anagram of the poem's title. Remarkable.
Proceeding slowly through the book, I've read through an annoying patch with a particularly hearty and personal attack on Nabokov, in part accusing him of hearty and personal attacks on his critics regarding poetry translation. And a boring chapter or two of repetitive and less than inspired digressions, but then I find some treasures later on. Ah, well. The work of a brilliant and successful academic, proud and accomplished enough to rebuff the stern editor this book so badly needed. He even remarks that once one has established a reputation as a fine writer, one can often get away with publishing drivel later, although I'm not sure he intended that to be self-
referential.
T. (in which a short version of "Lolita" has been written in verse). Can you translate such a poem into or out of such a language? Is the "meaning" dependent on the form? How lame would a Google translation be, oblivious to the formal elements of the original language? Some people will find it tedious, but I think you will find delightful passages often enough to carry you through the slow bits. I am finding it so.
Have you ever come across this odd poem?
Read it and see if you can figure out what makes it
seem a bit awkward, besides its irregular meter:
Washington Crossing the Delaware
A hard, howling, tossing water scene.
Strong tide was washing hero clean.
"How cold!" Weather stings as in anger.
O Silent night shows war ace danger!
The cold waters swashing on in rage.
Redcoats warn slow his hint engage.
When star general's action wish'd "Go!"
He saw his ragged continentals row.
Ah, he stands - sailor crew went going.
And so this general watches rowing.
He hastens - winter again grows cold.
A wet crew gain Hessian stronghold.
George can't lose war with's hands in;
He's astern - so go alight, crew, and win!
David Shulman, 1936
This poem was is one of the ones quoted in this Hofstadter book, and it's one that would be hard to imagine translating faithfully into another language, since in addition to whatever the content is or appears to be, and the standard sonnet rhyme scheme, you might have noticed that each line is an anagram of the poem's title. Remarkable.
Proceeding slowly through the book, I've read through an annoying patch with a particularly hearty and personal attack on Nabokov, in part accusing him of hearty and personal attacks on his critics regarding poetry translation. And a boring chapter or two of repetitive and less than inspired digressions, but then I find some treasures later on. Ah, well. The work of a brilliant and successful academic, proud and accomplished enough to rebuff the stern editor this book so badly needed. He even remarks that once one has established a reputation as a fine writer, one can often get away with publishing drivel later, although I'm not sure he intended that to be self-
referential.
did-not-finish
July 10, 2020I’ve made it a good slog of the way through this mighty tome of a book, but at the moment it’s just not engrossing enough to merit the remaining time required to finish it, and I have much more urgent things on my reading list now. I’ll keep a bookmark in it, though, and hopefully come back to finish it sometime.
A review so far:
This could legitimately be called two separate books. If you want to read just the “Poems” sections, exploring all the different translation options, I think that would be perfectly coherent, interesting, and instructive all on its own. This was what drew me in in the first place. The chapters in between (which actually make up the bulk of the book) tackle topics of varying degrees of relevance in excruciating detail. Some of it will be fascinating, some boring, depending on your interest, though most of it could probably be trimmed by about half.
Hofstadter is clearly a brilliant polymath and uses this book to just revel in being so. I can’t go so far as to call him pretentious or boastful, because he’s just so clearly enjoying himself the whole time. But I do get rather tired of him constantly enjoying himself. That’s not what I’m here for. And he has a tendency to try to one-up everyone, beyond the point where it’s interesting or useful. For example, he praises Tom Lehrer’s brilliance in the way he found a rhyme for “orange” in a song. But then he goes and writes five more rhymes for it using exactly the same trick, which very successfully moves us from admiring to bored in only ten lines.
Still, there’s a lot of very interesting stuff to think about in here if you’re interested in poetry, translation, or any remotely related subject.
A review so far:
This could legitimately be called two separate books. If you want to read just the “Poems” sections, exploring all the different translation options, I think that would be perfectly coherent, interesting, and instructive all on its own. This was what drew me in in the first place. The chapters in between (which actually make up the bulk of the book) tackle topics of varying degrees of relevance in excruciating detail. Some of it will be fascinating, some boring, depending on your interest, though most of it could probably be trimmed by about half.
Hofstadter is clearly a brilliant polymath and uses this book to just revel in being so. I can’t go so far as to call him pretentious or boastful, because he’s just so clearly enjoying himself the whole time. But I do get rather tired of him constantly enjoying himself. That’s not what I’m here for. And he has a tendency to try to one-up everyone, beyond the point where it’s interesting or useful. For example, he praises Tom Lehrer’s brilliance in the way he found a rhyme for “orange” in a song. But then he goes and writes five more rhymes for it using exactly the same trick, which very successfully moves us from admiring to bored in only ten lines.
Still, there’s a lot of very interesting stuff to think about in here if you’re interested in poetry, translation, or any remotely related subject.
August 5, 2014
Le Ton Beau is somewhat rambling, doesn't reach the mind-blowing heights of _Godel, Escher, Bach_ (nothing does), and has enough literature to turn off science geeks and enough science to turn off literary folk. Yet I come back to the ideas within it more frequently than most all of the books I've read. I recommend it to anyone who enjoyed GEB and wants more.
The central device is an obscure but wonderful poem by a 15th century French monk: a simple, elegant, universal, timeless text. The book demonstrates myriad iterations on what it means to "translate" a word, using several dozen independent translations contributed by experts, amateurs, thinkers, machines, into English, into French, into modernity, into code, along any surprising number of parallel lines that Hofstadter so excels at seeing.
Above all I took two things away from this text. One is that from then on I always purchase two independent translations of any foreign work. It's stunning how distinct you'll find they are and how much literary artistry a good translation requires. The second is an enduring affection for "Booze and the Blowens", a translation of a poem by F Villon into thieve's cant. Enjoy magician Ricky Jay's performance here http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h6L9oc2uGY4
The central device is an obscure but wonderful poem by a 15th century French monk: a simple, elegant, universal, timeless text. The book demonstrates myriad iterations on what it means to "translate" a word, using several dozen independent translations contributed by experts, amateurs, thinkers, machines, into English, into French, into modernity, into code, along any surprising number of parallel lines that Hofstadter so excels at seeing.
Above all I took two things away from this text. One is that from then on I always purchase two independent translations of any foreign work. It's stunning how distinct you'll find they are and how much literary artistry a good translation requires. The second is an enduring affection for "Booze and the Blowens", a translation of a poem by F Villon into thieve's cant. Enjoy magician Ricky Jay's performance here http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h6L9oc2uGY4
August 28, 2016
The prose is playful and so is the verse. Translated or not. Hofstadter definitely has what he reckons a good translator should - a sense of humor. The sense that allows one to take more risks and so arrive at a better translation, whether others (notably Nabakov) would rather call it a paraphrase or not. I was continuously surprised by little wordplay here and little rhyme and rhythm there, often in sentences that could have worked just as well in their dull counterpart forms in any other book. Truly a joy to read.
It was also tangibly heartfelt and personal. The stories of Carol (his missed wife) and the kids, of Italy and France, of music and trans-lation, transportation, and -culturation of his own previous works. All of these personal vignettes mixed with insightful attempts at generalization and impressive display of reflection.
He inspired me to also try and render Marot's ditty into Estonian, my native tongue, without speaking a word of French myself. All I currently have is a stab at a literal trisyllabic version, which forgoes rhyme, and a half of a slant-rhyming one. He'd probably shun me for even trying the latter, but rhyming in Estonian is all too new to me and one has to start somewhere.
It was also tangibly heartfelt and personal. The stories of Carol (his missed wife) and the kids, of Italy and France, of music and trans-lation, transportation, and -culturation of his own previous works. All of these personal vignettes mixed with insightful attempts at generalization and impressive display of reflection.
He inspired me to also try and render Marot's ditty into Estonian, my native tongue, without speaking a word of French myself. All I currently have is a stab at a literal trisyllabic version, which forgoes rhyme, and a half of a slant-rhyming one. He'd probably shun me for even trying the latter, but rhyming in Estonian is all too new to me and one has to start somewhere.
March 9, 2009
I finally finished this book over the weekend. I've been reading it for years--it's that kind of book. And it was sitting on my bookshelf for quite a while until I picked it up again last year.
I told someone it was one of my favorite books of all time to read. I know that sounds awkward but what I mean is that I like reading Douglas Hofstadter. He's a bit of a rambler but has such an interesting mind that I don't mind being taken hither and yon by him.
This book is essentially about translation and the ways that humans and computers use language. But the thing that makes the book more than just a treatise about the psychology of language is that Hofstadter's wife had died suddenly of a brain tumor just shortly before the book was published and the book as much a tribute to her as anything else.
Hofstadter is fascinated by patterns as evidenced in his most famous book "Godel, Escher and Bach." The present title takes a "simple" poem by an obscure 16th century French author Clement Marot and shows how translation works (or doesn't).
If you love language and have an open mind and take your time with this book it will reward you with a wonderfully pleasurable experience.
I told someone it was one of my favorite books of all time to read. I know that sounds awkward but what I mean is that I like reading Douglas Hofstadter. He's a bit of a rambler but has such an interesting mind that I don't mind being taken hither and yon by him.
This book is essentially about translation and the ways that humans and computers use language. But the thing that makes the book more than just a treatise about the psychology of language is that Hofstadter's wife had died suddenly of a brain tumor just shortly before the book was published and the book as much a tribute to her as anything else.
Hofstadter is fascinated by patterns as evidenced in his most famous book "Godel, Escher and Bach." The present title takes a "simple" poem by an obscure 16th century French author Clement Marot and shows how translation works (or doesn't).
If you love language and have an open mind and take your time with this book it will reward you with a wonderfully pleasurable experience.
August 8, 2020
I loved Godel Escher Bach, and a couple of Hofstadter's other books too, but this one, no. His playfulness with words works wonderfully in the context of explaining mathematical concepts, but in explaining poetry and translation, his playfulness has all the depth of a computer scientist making puns. Which is what this is.
There are smart observations here and there. That's the good part. But this book is huge. It could be cut down by a third and still be redundant. Worse still is what a pompous ass Hofstadter comes across as. His "rules" for what makes poetry poetry are insane. When he talks about music you'll be pulling your hair out. He calls out other translators and authors for being opinionated jerks, then turns into an opinionated jerk, smug and self-righteous--when the topic is the art of translation.
In the same paragraph he'll talk about translation as a hugely subjective art, then trash a translater for not obeying the "correct" aspects of a poem. It's absurd. He should stick to what he knows: computer science, math, AI.
There are smart observations here and there. That's the good part. But this book is huge. It could be cut down by a third and still be redundant. Worse still is what a pompous ass Hofstadter comes across as. His "rules" for what makes poetry poetry are insane. When he talks about music you'll be pulling your hair out. He calls out other translators and authors for being opinionated jerks, then turns into an opinionated jerk, smug and self-righteous--when the topic is the art of translation.
In the same paragraph he'll talk about translation as a hugely subjective art, then trash a translater for not obeying the "correct" aspects of a poem. It's absurd. He should stick to what he knows: computer science, math, AI.
December 18, 2008
A book about many different translations of a small poem of Marot's. A book about the joys and difficulties of translation. A book of riffs on the theme of translation (translating jokes, machine translation). A book on the death of the author's wife.
Unfortunately "translation" doesn't seem to provide enough material to stretch to the full length, so I find reading the book as a whole repetitive or even burdensome by the end. I prefer Metamagical Themas and GEB because of their greater variety. Others no doubt will like this better. (I see one reviewer calls this "more human" than GEB; presumably meaning those of us who are mathematically oriented are less human? Or maybe they merely meant more maudlin.)
Unfortunately "translation" doesn't seem to provide enough material to stretch to the full length, so I find reading the book as a whole repetitive or even burdensome by the end. I prefer Metamagical Themas and GEB because of their greater variety. Others no doubt will like this better. (I see one reviewer calls this "more human" than GEB; presumably meaning those of us who are mathematically oriented are less human? Or maybe they merely meant more maudlin.)
August 22, 2018
Hofstadter nimmt sich ein alte Gedicht und übersetzt es - immer wieder und plaudert über Übersetzung im Allgemeinen. Voller Esprit, vielleicht etwas zu schwafelnd. Toll, daß es so etwas geben darf. Natürlich nur, weil der Mann vorher ein paar Bestseller geschrieben hat. Und Leute alles von ihm kaufen. So wie ich.
(Und hier mein Beitrag:)
An ein krankes Fräulein
Bin zur Zeit
schlecht gelaunt,
denn man raunt
Sie sei’n krank.
Gott sei Dank
bin ich nah,
für Sie da.
Gruß von mir
send ich Dir
in die Zell’.
Auf nun schnell,
werd’ gesund,
Ralf tut’s kund!
Zu schade,
Teint fade!
Droht Schlankheit?
Weg Krankheit!
Hab’ kein Schiß
komm und iß
Nutella!
(Noch greller?)
Steh’ schon auf,
Rotwein sauf!
Komm zu mir!
Ich zu Dir?
Bin bereit,
schöne Maid.
(Und hier mein Beitrag:)
An ein krankes Fräulein
Bin zur Zeit
schlecht gelaunt,
denn man raunt
Sie sei’n krank.
Gott sei Dank
bin ich nah,
für Sie da.
Gruß von mir
send ich Dir
in die Zell’.
Auf nun schnell,
werd’ gesund,
Ralf tut’s kund!
Zu schade,
Teint fade!
Droht Schlankheit?
Weg Krankheit!
Hab’ kein Schiß
komm und iß
Nutella!
(Noch greller?)
Steh’ schon auf,
Rotwein sauf!
Komm zu mir!
Ich zu Dir?
Bin bereit,
schöne Maid.
January 13, 2009
I bought it inspired by Godel Escher Bach, but although it has lots of interesting
elements, I find it quite exhausting. Maybe that's because the playfulness I appreciated in the mathematical domain in GEB in this book, applied to the linguistic and literary domain, turns into pointless speculation. At least for me.
(And the typography is a crime. Note: never, ever let authors design their books!)
elements, I find it quite exhausting. Maybe that's because the playfulness I appreciated in the mathematical domain in GEB in this book, applied to the linguistic and literary domain, turns into pointless speculation. At least for me.
(And the typography is a crime. Note: never, ever let authors design their books!)
June 6, 2012
This is one of my favorite books ever. How do you translate poetry? How do you respect constraints of rhyme and meter? Do you have to let the literal meaning slip? If so, how? What kinds of creativity are involved?
Lots of great examples of constraints producing artistic creativity, including poems (lipograms) where the authors don't let themselves use certain vowels and consonants. A very engaging and satisfying read.
Lots of great examples of constraints producing artistic creativity, including poems (lipograms) where the authors don't let themselves use certain vowels and consonants. A very engaging and satisfying read.
April 22, 2011
Perhaps I am too tired to give it its due.
April 3, 2021
Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language by Douglas R. Hofstadter has, since its publication in 1997, become a classic in the field of literary translation. This book was recommended to me by John Chew, and although my library had it in its collection, the book’s dimensions and heft made it off-putting. Wider than a standard academic paperback, it tended to flop around and was not easy to hold while standing waiting for the bus. Its total pagination remains a mystery, since in addition to its 632 “regular” pages, the poems therein were numbered and lettered according to their own sequence (and the last alphanumeric poetic sequence stopped at 72b). I decided to read it when my library withdrew it in advance of our two-year closure for a major renovation. So what’s the book about?
The cover of the book tells the story. Depicted on the cross is the full text of the poem A une Damoyselle malade, written in 1537 by French poet Clément Marot. Although entitled correctly on page 1b, Hofstadter refers to it as Ma mignonne, the poem’s first as well as its last line, throughout the text. Hofstadter’s mission was to have the poem translated. Not only did he do so himself–several times over according to various themes and schemes–but also his friends, colleagues, and beloved wife Carol tried translating it as well.
There is a story within a story as aside from critiquing the translations received, Hofstadter shares his love story with his wife. He reveals right away that Carol dies young, from an illness with a cryptic medical name that is later revealed to be a brain tumour.
I wish more authors were like Hofstadter. Before I had even reached page one, I knew I liked the guy. You may call it obsessive or fanatical, but I call it caring for one’s art. Why can’t authors be just as vigilant about their craft? Here’s what he says on pp. xviii-xix:
“Because I have always had a very clear sense of how things should look on a page, I dearly wanted to be able to control every tiny detail of my book’s overall look, ranging from the cover art to the typefaces used to the size of the pages to the way displays are indented, and so on. Fortunately, the people at Basic Books have grown used to me and my idiosyncracies over the years I have worked with them, and they assented to my unusual request.
“Consequently, I have enjoyed total control over such things as line-breaks, page-breaks, hyphenations, widows, orphans, density of word spacing within lines, fine-grained intercharacter spacing (‘kerning’), and so forth and so on–things that most people usually are unaware of and simply leave to their publisher or their word processor. I am a fanatic, though, and these things matter a great deal to me. Not only do they matter to me, they have had an overwhelming impact on this book from start to finish. This may sound crazy, but it is the gospel truth.”
Irony of ironies then that Hofstadter misspelled millennium as millenium on the first line of page 1. I expected him to reveal this as an intentional misspelling and did not give up on this possibility of a mea culpa even after reading hundreds of more pages. But on at least two occasions he spelled the word correctly, as on page 525 as millennia. I felt certain that later printings would have corrected this, but the Amazon on-line preview still shows the misspelling.
Le Ton beau de Marot is as much a psychological study of Hofstadter as it is a breakdown of his linguistic obsessions and neuroses. I would love to debate him on two of his bugaboos, the nonsexist use of guys and man. But that’s another story. In addition to all things pertaining to language and translation, we learned about Hofstadter’s childhood, intense interest in classical music, family life, travels and love affair with Carol. He always wrote about moments in his life when he first encountered a musical piece or discovered a remarkable restaurant in an unlikely destination. These were not non sequitur contributions and enhanced the text inasmuch as the title states: “in praise of the music of translation”, for I believe his perceptive and cultured worldview improved his output as a translator. Thus what we are reading within these 632 pages is a translation study intertwined with memoir.
I can only summarize a book of such colossal heft in bits and pieces and I was lapping up some chapters while loathing others, damning every page I turned to find even more on the same boring topic. My habit, once I start reading, is never to flip ahead to see how much longer a chapter is if I am not enjoying what I am reading. Thus the section on artificial intelligence was a test of patience.
Lipograms, where certain letters of the alphabet are intentionally left out of writing, can present new challenges to the translator. Does one translate the text as a lipogram into the target language? Hofstadter, I gotta hand it to him, never simply posed those questions then left it up to the reader to ponder over. He acted upon them by creating his own lipograms. Hofstadter never left it at one attempt; he was constantly trying to perfect his work and revisited translations and shared the results with us. This holds true not just in regards to his translations of word games, but in poetic styles that he encountered. I lost count of the number of times he translated Ma mignonne based on the translation exercise at hand: was he working with a certain syllable count or a specific rhyming scheme or translating the poem itself into a lipogram or a haiku?
I found the chapter on “untranslatable poetry” to be the most amusing. Hofstadter provided some head-scratching examples by Dylan Thomas and e. e. cummings where native English speakers including me found them indecipherable. So how would you translate them? Likewise the chapter on machine translation programs and their attempts to translate Ma mignonne made me giggle at the results. The Candide program, for example, translated the title of the poem as My Flapper. We learned of transculturation and what is always a debate in translation studies: do you have the freedom to contribute to the text or should a translator only work with what is in front of him?
Hofstadter summed up two chapters within each of the following profound tenets of translation. You can see on which side of the translation debate Hofstadter stands:
“Choice of medium is, to my mind, the most delicious degree of freedom open to a translator, and is what makes translation so open-ended and full of unlimited potential for creativity. Suppress that freedom, and you reduce translation to a tiny and quite boring caricature of itself.”
and:
“The essence of the act of translating poetry is to exercise the highest respect for the original poet’s indissoluble fusion of a message with a medium, the unsunderable wedding of content to form as equal partners.”
As I finished the main text before the final section of Notes, I had to note the poignancy of how life mirrors art on page 566. Or in this particular case how my personal life is imitating someone else’s. As Hofstadter recounted the story of Carol’s headaches, hospitalization and brain tumour diagnosis, I could only steel myself to the diagnosis my doctor gave me less than 24 hours before, that I had a retroperitoneal liposarcoma 13 × 10 × 10 cm in size. I’ll write more as I learn more about it but I’d been putting off writing anything until I knew at least this much. What Carol said herself about her own diagnosis is similar to what my own doctor said to me (maybe he read the same book):
“I had to break the news to Carol, who blinked for a moment as the enormity of it all registered, and then simply said, ‘Some people, when they find out they have a tumor, ask, “Why me?” They don’t think to themselves that they’re made of billions and billions of tiny cells, and just one thing needs to go wrong… It’s just bad luck.'”
By the time I got to the end of the book at page 571, to the full-page photo of Carol and the only time the reader gets to see her, I had to stop and have a closed-eye cry. A beautiful young woman, wife and mother who after 571 pages the reader gets to know as a close friend, suddenly felled by a brain tumour. I can only wonder what my own fate will be.
May 26, 2024
Hofstadter’s long love letter to Marot’s poem, language, and the mystery of meaning.
As an engineer that works in software,
amateur musician, and a sometimes speaker of two languages beyond my native tongue, l really identified with the author’s enchantment with language and the challenges of trying to recreate in a target language the essence of poetry in source language.
I took on the challenge he issues in the beginning, which is to create YOUR OWN translation of Marot’s 500 year old, 28 line, three syllable per line masterpiece. This got me hooked, and I ended up writing two more poems having the same structure, with subjects of Detroit, MI. I would encourage you to also not skip the challenge - the book becomes that much more engaging.
The book alternately covers subject matter related to translation with chapters that contain translations of Marot’s poem that the author has collected over many years. I admit that after reviewing the umpteenth version, by Hofstadter or others, in English or other, of the Marot poem, it became a bit much. That being said, if you have any interest whatsoever in language translation, this is a must read.
As an engineer that works in software,
amateur musician, and a sometimes speaker of two languages beyond my native tongue, l really identified with the author’s enchantment with language and the challenges of trying to recreate in a target language the essence of poetry in source language.
I took on the challenge he issues in the beginning, which is to create YOUR OWN translation of Marot’s 500 year old, 28 line, three syllable per line masterpiece. This got me hooked, and I ended up writing two more poems having the same structure, with subjects of Detroit, MI. I would encourage you to also not skip the challenge - the book becomes that much more engaging.
The book alternately covers subject matter related to translation with chapters that contain translations of Marot’s poem that the author has collected over many years. I admit that after reviewing the umpteenth version, by Hofstadter or others, in English or other, of the Marot poem, it became a bit much. That being said, if you have any interest whatsoever in language translation, this is a must read.
October 28, 2024
5 months of reading this off and on has really cemented it as one of my all time favorites. So fascinating and engaging the entire time . I do think it works better in chunks than a marathon read but that’s just me.
From a person that has little to no interest in poetry to be so locked in to this book has to be a testament to its ability to ring you in, though maybe those who have a more firm grasp on the subject might find it tedious. I personally found this extremely well done endlessly intriguing and motivated me further to learn new languages and test myself by translating. So many rants and questions and debates surrounding probably the most important human invention
From a person that has little to no interest in poetry to be so locked in to this book has to be a testament to its ability to ring you in, though maybe those who have a more firm grasp on the subject might find it tedious. I personally found this extremely well done endlessly intriguing and motivated me further to learn new languages and test myself by translating. So many rants and questions and debates surrounding probably the most important human invention
August 23, 2023
This book explores in depth the art of translation, using a poem written by Marot to illustrate concepts such as form, semantics, rhythm, meaning, Artificial Intelligence, and soul. The book has taken me over 6 months to read - each chapter a new flavor that requires you to ponder what it means to be human. You can only read this book in English, and only in the paperback version as Hofstadter used the form of the book as part of the illustration of his points. This is a book I will pass on to someone who loves words and language.
October 23, 2024
Take a short French poem. Then examine it, analyze it, manipulate from a dozen perspectives. An absorbing work from the brilliant if slightly compulsive mind of Douglas R. Hostadter. He makes fascinating connections between themes. If you enjoy translations and plays on words, you’ll love this book. If you speak some French or German, bonus. If not, you’ll still find this work to be an involving, articulate and impressive tour de force.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 109 reviews