Le Ton Beau De Marot: In Praise Of The Music Of Language [Paperback]

Douglas R. Hofstadter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 23, 1998

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 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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In the fall of 1537, a child was confined to bed for some time. The French poet Clément Marot wrote her a get-well poem, 28 lines long, each line a scant three syllables. In the mid-1980s, the outrageously gifted Douglas R. Hofstadter--il miglior fabbro of Godel, Escher, Bach--first attempted to translate this "sweet, old, small elegant French poem into English." He was later to challenge friends, relations, and colleagues to do the same. The results were exceptional, and are now contained in Le Ton Beau De Marot, a sunny exploration of scholarly and linguistic play and love's infinity. Less sunny, however, is the tragedy that hangs over Hofstadter's book, the sudden death of his wife, Carol, from a brain tumor. (Her translation is among the book's finest.)

Marot's poem, in Hofstadter's initial translation (he is to compose many more), begins: "My sweet, / I bid you / A good day; / The stay / Is prison. / Health / Recover, / Then open / Your door ... "--a slim frame on which to hang 600 or so pages of text. But the book is far more than a compendium of translators' triumphs (with the occasional misstep). Most of the renderings are original and lively, some lovely, though Hofstadter often feels compelled to improve them. He lightly laments that Bill Cavnar's rendering, "though superb along so many dimensions at once, still seems to lack a bit of that intangible verbal sparkle that I associate with the deepest Maroticity."

Hofstadter's talents lie in linking his intoxication, erudition, and vision with humor, autobiography, and free association. His book takes on "rigidists," asks questions like, "Is plagiarism potentially creative?" and strives to define linguistic soul. Along the way, it accords the same level of respect to the seemingly trivial: sex jokes, Texas jokes, The Seven Year Itch, and the puzzle of how someone you love can hate a food that you adore. Throughout there is pun, ingenuity, and above all, love for language--which can compress distance and, through constraint, lead to freedom. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Clement Marot (1496-1544) may have been a great French poet, but "A une Da-moyselle malade" is not his best effort. Essentially it's a get-well greeting: sorry that you're sick, but try to eat something and get some fresh air. The ditty serves as a springboard for Hofstadter's thoughts about language, translation, culture and human genius as the author, his friends, translators, scholars and even computer programs contribute to numbing permutations of this one weak lyric. Hofstadter, a professor of artificial intelligence at Indiana University, had bestsellers with the 1980 Pulitzer Prize-winning Godel, Escher, Bach and a collection of essays reprinted from Scientific American, called Metamagical Themas. Here he is on shakier ground. Hofstadter is not a poet but doesn't hesitate to lay out his opinions: for example, all rhyming translations of "Eugene Onegin" are "excellent" and "fine," but he trashes Vladimir Nabokov's monumental and helpful literal version; he also calls Lolita "pedophilic pornography." And while there are moments of wit, intelligence and uncommon curiosity, there is also a diffuse structure and inflated?and sometimes hokey?prose: "In SimTown, many other things can happen including houses being set on fire and goldfish flopping out of their bowls. (I'm leaving off the quotes merely as a shorthand?I know they aren't real goldfish!)". His cheery gee-whizzery often rings false, and there's probably a good reason for the hollow sound?in 1993, his wife died of a rare disease, which probably also explains his choice of the verse. This book pays tribute to her, while illustrating the powers and limitations of speech. $60,000 ad/promo.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 832 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; Reprint edition (May 23, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465086454
• ISBN-13: 978-0465086450
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 1.6 x 9.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (52 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #543,256 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

49 of 52 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The French for GEB is Le Ton Beau de Marot. May 17, 2000

By "houndzoflove"

Format:Paperback

Some people say it's not as good as GEB - but it really is. It's just different. Both of these two books - Hofstadter's best, along with Metamagical Themas - are controlled by some single vision, some idea that somehow managed to spark seven hundred or so pages of ideas.

GEB was more complex. The ideas were harder. Le Ton Beau de Marot is, at its core, a book about translation. The book was inspired by the author's attempts to translate a short (28 trisyllabic lines) poem by an obscure French Renaissance poet named Clement Marot. (You'll probably have the poem memorized by the end of the book, at least if you know French - and if you don't, it's conveniently included on a detachable bookmark on the inside back cover.) Hofstadter, after tackling this challenge himself, sent out a letter (reprinted in the book) to many friends challenging them to translate it as well, including a list of some formal constraints on the poem that he wanted to point out and two fairly literal glosses of the poem for the non-francophones in his circle. The book's structure (like all of DRH's other books) is one of alternation - small groups of translations of the poem, which originally were meant to constitute the whole book but now make up a sort of sideshow and can be skipped without detracting from the understanding of the book, alternate with chapters on various issues of translation. The poems don't play the role that you might expect, a role roughly analogous to that of the dialogues in GEB. In GEB, the dialogues were meant to introduce some point that would be developed in the chapter. Here, they're not.

Most of the book consists of discussions of some of the dilemmas of literary translation, with examples drawn from various literary works. Among Hofstadter's favorite examples is Alexander Pushkin's quintessential Russian novel in verse, Eugene Onegin. EO is written in several hundred "Onegin stanzas", essentially modified sonnets, but some translators don't do a great job of keeping this form. Hofstadter didn't know Russian at the time, but he exhibits various translations and shows their merits and flaws, and does a quite good job, at least to my inexperienced eye. (He has since learned Russian, and did his own translation of Eugene Onegin, which is currently for sale.)

Poetic translation, of course, is the soul of this book, and Hofstadter subscribes to the school of translation believing that the medium and the message are equally important. He thus spends a chapter talking about Dante's Divine Comedy. One of the important things about the Divine Comedy is that it is written in a form known as terza rima - three line stanzas, rhyming ABA, BCB, CDC, DED, and so on - which contributes greatly to the interest of the poem. Many translators ignore this, for reasons of "scholarly purity" or something equally pompous - but Hofstadter convinces us that that can't be done.

Again, dealing with the issue of form, I note the large number of constraints that Hofstadter placed on himself in the writing of this book. He claims to have spent an inordinate amount of time worrying about the typesetting and such things; thus, none of the poems within chapters, for example, are broken across page boundaries. (There are literally hundreds of poetic examples - so don't say that this is just a coincidence.) Hofstadter also seems to like lipogrammatic writing (that is, writing without a certain letter, usually the letter "e"), and even translated Searle's Chinese Room anecdote into "Anglo-Saxon" (that is, "e"-less English). This raises an interesting question - why is it that translating from, say, English to French is totally acceptable, while translating from British English to American English (or vice versa) is sacrilege?

In conclusion, an excellent look at the issues involved in translation. Of course, this being Hofstadter, there is some talk about AI and machine translation - but that isn't the core of the book. Much more literary than you might expect - but Hofstadter is polymathic enough that that's not a problem. Don't let the size put you off - it will go quickly. Maybe too quickly - but don't all the best?

146 of 165 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars In Disparagement of the Monotony of Language May 19, 2003

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

Dearest Doug,
Please don't bug
Us with rhyme
One more time.
Reading through
Sev'nty-two
Poems built on
"Ma Mignonne"
Is real tough.
Nuff's enough!
And no line
For Will Quine
When you ask
If the task
To create
A translate
Can be done?
It's no fun,
Also rude,
To conclude
Douglas Hof-
Stadter's off
Of his game.
All the same,
We can see
G-E-B
This is not.
Thanks a lot!

42 of 47 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars an idiosyncratic book, sometimes clever, but flawed August 4, 2003

By Theodore M. Alper

Format:Paperback

Hofstadter is a very clever guy, with an ear for wordplay and some interesting things to say about the concept of translation. But he could use an editor and he has a number of blind spots as a thinker and as a literary judge.

Much of what is most intriguing about the book is its strong individuality. H. knows what he wants to say, he knows how he wants to say it, he has intensely precise ideas of how the book should look. For example, it matters painfully to him that the pages come out just so, with just the right number of lines so that every word comes out on the right place on its page. He takes this to extremes -- when he can't get permission to quote from Catcher in the Rye, he is forced to improvise a passage of EXACTLY the same length in order to keep everything perfect.

Incidentally, it's sort of surprising, given his feelings about the importance of all these details of presentation, that he can't understand Nabokov's insistence that translators, by paraphrasing and padding lines, inevitably alter dramatically the effects of the originals. H. would find his own book unacceptably altered if a linebreak was wrong, but he refuses to accept that someone might find something essential lacking when Pushkin's stanzas are rendered into English approximations.

I'll confess to being somewhat biased in favor of Nabokov -- and I can't help but wonder if Hofstadter has ever read Pale Fire.
[in several places, H. plays upon the titles of Nabokov's works, but not in a way that gives any sense that he has read anything other than his essays on translation and his literal translation of Eugene Onegin]

Anyway, back to *this* book -- it's a very personal book in content, too, the details of Hofstadter's life intertwine with the poem, all the translations, and the commentaries. At times, it's quite moving -- the illess of H.'s wife and his sense of loss come through almost everywhere, even when he seems to be discussing something completely unrelated; even the most playful parts of the book seem to have a slighly sad twinge.

On the other hand, many of his reminiscences of his college days, or clever things someone came up with at a dinner party in Italy [something like that, I don't remember all the details any more] don't work for me.

And I really don't like the way H. so often dismisses those he disagrees with in pretty, well, dismissive terms. If H. doesn't understand a psychologist, it's because he's speaking psychobabble or pseudo-intellectual fakery (maybe he is, of course; but I need more than H.'s word to believe it); if a modern poet tries to translate Dante without rhyme, or with only 37 stanzas in a canto instead of 45, H. is stunned and contemptuous. (Incidentally, it often seems to me that some of the mechanical details of a poem matter more to H. than the language and imagery it contains.)

And, of course, he hits poor, dead Nabokov so hard you might think that he wasn't actually one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century as well as someone deeply aware of the issues of literary creativity in multiple languages and the problems of literary translation. To H., it's not enough that N. be wrong, he must be "jealous", full of "bitter bluster", and, finally,
"pathetic".

I don't mean all this to be as negative as it sounds -- there *is* a lot to like in this book, and I'm very glad I read it. The series of translations of the Marot poem are charming and varied, though only a few of them sustain anything like the tone of the original (as I dimly sense it) throughout.