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

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

4.24 of 5 stars 4.24 · rating details · 411 ratings · 57 reviews

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 e...more 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.(less)

Paperback, 832 pages

Published May 23rd 1998 by Basic Books (first published 1997)

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Nov 11, 2007 David rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: top-20, read-in-2007, words-and-language

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...more

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May 12, 2010 Isis rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: translators and lovers of language

Shelves: favorites

(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 co...more

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Sep 28, 2007 Hillary rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: language nerds

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, we...more

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Mar 09, 2009 Tom rated it 5 of 5 stars

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 a...more

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Jul 26, 2012 greg rated it 3 of 5 stars

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,...more

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Aug 30, 2011 Donna rated it 3 of 5 stars

Douglas Hofstadter is a great mind, and I loved the premise of the book, about the problem of translation from one tongue to another. However, I was often distracted from his points by what I perceived as his professorial arrogance. He invited several colleagues and friends from the IU community, as I remember, to translate a particular poem, and critiqued each one. There were several that, imho, I felt were superb in keeping closely to both the spirit and the language of the original. But to hi...more

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Nov 06, 2010 Ed Erwin rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: linguistics

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...more 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.
(less)

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Jan 27, 2011 Scurra rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

As someone else said, if I could give this book six stars, I would.
More "complete" than GEB, perhaps because it is more personal, Hofstadter nevertheless maintains his trademark diversions and sidetrips, without ever losing sight of his goal, which is to try and convey the insanity and joy of translation and to attempt understand why polylinguism is both a curse and a blessing.

And providing the spine of the book are the numerous translations of Ma Mignonne, all of which are terrific and all of w...more

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Dec 18, 2008 Mark rated it 4 of 5 stars

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....more

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Apr 15, 2013 Kris rated it 5 of 5 stars

Not quite as good, or at least as universal, as GEB, but still severely under-appreciated. Part of the problem is that Ton Beau goes after a whole different set of problems, literary ones, that I'm sure just didn't interested the AI/philosophy crowd that ate up GEB, while at the same time anyone who comes from a purely literary background is probably put off by sections on Machine Translation (Google Translate can't do poetry - shocker! is probably the standard reaction, though not an entirely f...more Not quite as good, or at least as universal, as GEB, but still severely under-appreciated. Part of the problem is that Ton Beau goes after a whole different set of problems, literary ones, that I'm sure just didn't interested the AI/philosophy crowd that ate up GEB, while at the same time anyone who comes from a purely literary background is probably put off by sections on Machine Translation (Google Translate can't do poetry - shocker! is probably the standard reaction, though not an entirely fair one) and Hofstader himself (he has touching moments, but he's not much of a writer. The puns are too much, the ego is spread too thick, and he's not winning many bookies by comparing himself to Holden Caufield in Ton Beau's first sentence).

That being said, it's still an incredible achievement. Hofstader has succeeded in laying bare the translation process, demonstrating the depths to which it is a creative process, outlining its limits, and presenting some interesting thoughts on what these tell us about the human brain and human communication. Most importantly, it is clear. Through away some of the MT stuff and I think you have a book that almost anyone could understand, without sacrificing much depth. Between this and GEB, I think there lies Hofstader's real genius: honesty, completeness and clarity in describing complicated processes. No one can accuse him of being an academic writer. It's a a shame this book isn't standard assigned reading in CW courses.

I wonder if I completely agree with his final argument, of the importance of maintaining form in translation (though I don't think agreement is necessary to appreciate the book). It's compelling when he says it, though I've found free-verse translations of rhyming poets (Rilke, say) to be better than rhymed ones. The Dante section didn't convince (though I have a non-rhyming translation waiting to be read that I specifically chose among others, so, bias), though the Onegin section did, and I'm at a loss for why. The putdowns of Nabokov in the Onegin section were fantastic.(less)

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Oct 19, 2012 Rob rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: poetry, non-fiction, criticism, read-in-2012

(7/10) Translation is a thorny issue, especially for readers and critics who rely on a conventional idea of authorship. When you read a translated text, how much of what you read was in the original, how much is the translator's invention, and how much is some muddy middle ground between the two? Is the translator a kind of author? Is a translation a completely new text? Douglas Hoffstadter delves into these issues with Le Ton Beau De Marot, a paving stone-sized experimentally formatted tome tha...more (7/10) Translation is a thorny issue, especially for readers and critics who rely on a conventional idea of authorship. When you read a translated text, how much of what you read was in the original, how much is the translator's invention, and how much is some muddy middle ground between the two? Is the translator a kind of author? Is a translation a completely new text? Douglas Hoffstadter delves into these issues with Le Ton Beau De Marot, a paving stone-sized experimentally formatted tome that recalls his earlier hit Godel, Escher, Bach. This book is a less ambitious and more focused than GEB -- it only deals with the innumerate complexities of human languages. Along the way Hofstadter drops in on theories of cognition, cultural history, and autobiographical accounts of his attempt to raise the world's squarest kids.

Hofstadter's main argument is that form is essential to a piece, and that any translation needs to include form in its concerns -- so, for instance, a translated sonnet should still follow the same metre and rhyme scheme. This is all right as far as it goes (I'm something of a formalist myself), although I don't share Hofstadter's disdain for more literal translations, and in fact think they can be quite valuable. As an example of this principle, Hofstadter includes a multitude of translations of one Marot poem undertaken by he and his colleagues, using different ideas and conceits but sticking close to the form. Unfortunately, these examples kind of undercut his argument, as they're mostly doggerel, with sentences rearranged awkwardly and pat rhymes created in order to fit the formal constraints. Hofstadter in general seems to approach poetry, and particularly poetic translation, as less of an artistic activity and more of a linguistic puzzle, where one has to fit all the syllables together in the right order. This lack of aesthetic appreciation forms a major flaw in his argument.

One doesn't really need several hundred pages to present this argument, so there are a lot of tangents and overexplanations. Some of these are quite interesting, peculiar puzzles of translation and examples of interlinguistic strangeness. At other times it's just a devolution into repetitive and disingenous arguments, or angry old man rants. There's definitely worthwhile material and ideas in here, but the book as a whole is a decidedly mixed bag, and a bit of a disappointment.(less)

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Feb 05, 2011 Luke rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: brain

As "Godel Escher Bach" is to computation, "Le Ton beau de Marot" is to language. This is a large book - 600 pages, interleaved with 80 translations of the same short poem each with commentary - and a joy for anyone interested in language, translation, AI, or Hofstadter. For a shorter, more focused read you could try to limit yourself to the story of his life-long obsession with languages (chapters 2, 3, 6, 15), his profession and vocation in cognitive science and artificial intelligence (chapter...more

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Nov 06, 2008 Drew rated it 4 of 5 stars

A fantastic book on the nature of translation. Although written in a rather quirky fashion and with a great deal of asides, Hofstadter argues well that translation, especially of the literary variety, is a complex and creative art form that requires the translator to examine and weigh not only basic, face-value semantic considerations, but intent and purpose of the author, levels of semantic construction, nuance, word play, tone, voice, vocabulary, rhythm, style, and form among other factors. Ho...more

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Sep 19, 2008 Seth McGaw rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

An accidental find while in the linguistics stacks... having read (or attempted to read) "Godel Escher Bach" several years ago, I was too curious to not pick this one up, annoying fonts notwithstanding,...
So, I must say that this one is a much more layman-approach dealing with the subject of translation than I had anticipated from Hofstadter, and I got through it in a surprisingly short amount of time. There is much (a bit too much) in the way of invective against grandstanding linguistic litera...more

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Aug 01, 2007 Maria M. Elmvang rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: lovers of language and people interested in translation.

Shelves: non-fiction, not-owned, 2007, poetry, 3-stars

As you'll know by now, I'm typically a very fast reader. This book, however, took me almost a year to get through. I started in September 2006 and only just finished this morning. It's not that it's a bad book - in fact, it's really interesting! - it's just incredibly heavy to get through so I could only cope with a little bit each day.

I'd highly recommend this book to anybody interested in translations and language in general as Hofstadter has a fascinating way of describing both. I don't quit...more

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Jan 08, 2009 Steven rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: language, nonfiction, favorites

This is one of my favorite books and one of the most unique I've ever read. The book is a playful and intelligent look at the vagaries, difficulties, and joys of translating even the simplest literary work from one language to another. Hofstadter takes up Clement Marot's "A une Damoyselle malade"--a french poem of 28 3-syllable lines--and attempts to translate it into English. There are many (over 80, I believe) translations in the book, each displaying different qualities of the original, but n...more

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Sep 28, 2009 Chris rated it 5 of 5 stars

If you like "words", poetry, good writing, even word games, you might well love this book. Hofstader takes a small 28 line child's poem and attempts to translate it into English. He enlists his friends to help. The complexities of translation are exposed and you venture on at the end toward the complexities of the translation of Dante's Inferno. I assumed this was going to be one boring book---instead it fascinated me and I immediately wanted to start writing poetry!

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Jun 06, 2012 David Reiley rated it 5 of 5 stars

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.

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Jan 12, 2009 Sebastian rated it 1 of 5 stars

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!)

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Apr 03, 2011 Gregory rated it 5 of 5 stars

If you know Hofstadter only from Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, this is an amazing continuation. It is far more personal, a tribute to the love of his life. It is also an absolute joy for an amateur (or professional?) linguist.

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Sep 21, 2011 Ma-ree-yah rated it 3 of 5 stars

Entertaining observations on language and translation, which would be close to the heart of anyone who's ever tried to translate a text.
Much less scientific than expected (I thought it would be a proper linguistics book) and also in this edition the cover design and the font choices leave much to be desired.

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Nov 15, 2010 Maurizio Codogno rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: finished

È un libro in un certo senso triste, visto che ricorda la morte della moglie di Hofstadter. Non per nulla Doug non ha mai voluto che fosse tradotto in altre lingue, perché è troppo personale.
Però è un must have per chi è interessato alla creatività e ai problemi della traduzione.

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Feb 28, 2009 Tim rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: put-down-for-a-while

This is a fantastic exploration into the translation of one poem. It helps to know French so you can appreciate the different translations, howwever they are such different takes on the same entity that just reading thhe many translations gives you an idea of what you're missing. Brilliant.

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Mar 28, 2009 Stefan rated it 5 of 5 stars

In my opinion, Hofstadter's best book. Absolutely inspiring, thought-provoking, emotionally touching. It's one of the very, very few books I end up recommending with enthusiasm to people whose intelligence I appreciate –I don't think there's any non-fiction book I like better....more

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Apr 25, 2013 Penny rated it 5 of 5 stars

To oversimplify, this is a very large book about translating a very short poem from French into English.

This is about the complexities of translation and the various ways to read something when the original context may not be entirely clear. It is about how interpretation is shaped, and how language and design shapes the way something is written. This book would be impossible to translate: the bias of showing the English-language translations of the French-language poem would not come through. F...more

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Aug 07, 2011 Nancy rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011, non-fiction

It's taken me a very long time to finish this book, but it's been a labor of love. I recommend it to anyone who is multilingual and/or has any interest in poetry and translation.

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Jun 09, 2010 Z rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: anyone who likes books you can pick up and read in the middle and enjoy the book with no context

Absolutely masterful writing from an author who has evolved from highly serious analysis to casual discussion. Hofstadter is a thinker through and through.

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Apr 16, 2012 Collin Rogowski rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A really great book about the problems associated with translating prose or poetry. Very enjoyable and worthwhile...

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Nov 14, 2012 J Paul rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: science, non-fiction

The boundary between art and science explored through the looking glass of translation.

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Jul 10, 2011 Stephen Hull rated it 5 of 5 stars

Not only an amazing book, a lot of eerie synchronicity with my life...

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About Douglas R. Hofstadter

Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American academic 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 St...more Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American academic 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. FARG models also have an overarching philosophy that (less)

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