Do Lost in the 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
Clement Marot.
"Le ton beau de Marot" literally means "The sweet tone of Marot," but to
a French ear it suggest "Le tom beau 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 musing 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,
includingPushkin's "Eugene Onegin, " Dante's "Inferno, " Salinger's
"Catcher in the Rye, " Villon's "ballades, " Nabokov's essays, George
Perec's "La disparition, " Virkram 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 wellspring.
