Le Ton beau de Marot
In Praise of the Music of Language
by Douglas R. Hofstadter · first published 1997
52% recommend42% neutral6% critical
Why HN recommends it
Explores why translation is hard through dozens of renderings of one short French poem, asking what to preserve. Playful, personal, and attentive to language; suits GEB fans and anyone drawn to poetry or translation.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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
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…spiritual experience within a naturalistic world view. A lot of atheism that is public today misses empathy with religious experience. -Martin Gardner's articles -Douglas Hofstadter - Godel, Escher, Bach & Le Ton Beau De Marot - for those that enjoy spending all day thinking about logic & languages (hello programmers) these two books are romantic pulp - you know you shouldn't be reading them, they are so hopelessly impractical,…
on “Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Eight Books Everyone Should Read” ↗The Systran system is quite old, check out how Hofstadter thrashed it some years ago in his "Le Ton beau de Marot"(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Ton_beau_de_Marot) (awesome book on machine translation and literature in general, BTW). Looking at these I thought that (i) Google totally blows the competition out of…
on “Putting Google to the Test in Translation” ↗…that's the point: the large degree of constraint created by the medium, i.e. code that will compile, will lead to hitherto unexplored creativity. Hofstadter elaborates on this topic in his great book Le Ton Beau De Marot, e.g. whiel looking for a word that would rhyme with "orange". Another good example is the Georges Perec's lipogram (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipogram) novel Da Disparition in which the letter -e…
on “Code poetry” ↗Great news! Even when it's overwrought and opinionated, Hofstadter's writing is never boring, Le Ton Beau de Marot is, I think, one of the best books on translation. There isn't too much (English) information on Emmanuel Sander (other than his homepage: http://paragraphe.crac.free.fr/articles.php?lng=en&pg=79, Google…
on “Douglas Hofstadter has a new book” ↗Regarding poetry translation (and a lot more), there is this book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Ton_beau_de_Marot By Douglas Hofstadter, that I quite like and recommend!
on “Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?” ↗Gödel, Escher, Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter. Both a work of literary and technical genius. Le ton beau de Marot, also by Douglas Hofstadter. Was blown by his description of how making the typographical choice of starting the first word of each chapter with letters decreasing in height to the normal page font size,…
on “Ask HN: What is the most mind blowing book you've ever read?” ↗If you are at all interested in poetry and its translation as well as AI (assumed since on HN) a great book to read is Hofstadter's Le Ton Beau De Marot: In Praise Of The Music Of Language wherein he offers 60+ translations of a playful poem by Clement Marot.
on “Translator's Note to the Odyssey” ↗If you enjoy the idea of discussing how to translate (poetry in particular) I can't recommend enough "le ton beau de Marót" by Douglas Hofstadter of "Godel, Escher, Bach" fame. It explores various approaches to translation, discusses a lot of funny stuff and has a zillion different translations of the same poem, which is pretty entertaining tho it gets boring after a while. And interestingly enou
on “Two Japanese Jabberwocky Poems (2017)” ↗I found Hofstadter's _Le Ton beau de Marot_ fascinating, and also almost nobody has even heard of it!
on “A non-standard book list for software developers” ↗…disappointed. It's a horrendous textbook. Read it paying attention to his words, how and why he choses them, and GEB is a pretty marvelous thing. If the English language excites you, then read it, and read Le Ton Beau de Marot. GEB is a demonstration of ideas, not a discussion of them. Hofstadter is not a computer scientist. He's a philosopher, a linguist, and a gedankenspiel-smith. Read him to laugh and play. Expect pretension…
on “Ask HN: Experiences with 'Gödel, Escher, Bach' (GEB)?” ↗Translation is as much of an art as it is a science, so I wonder where this project is headed. Le Ton beau de Marot is a great book for illustrating this point. In college I had studied Japanese and a friend introduced me to the anime cartoon Initial D. His copy had the original Japanese with English subtitles, and…
on “Microsoft turns spoken English into spoken Mandarin – in the same voice” ↗…For broadening experience, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/04/language-and-bias/ And for intellectual delight, see: http://www.amazon.com/Le-Ton-Beau-De-Marot/dp/0465086454 http://books.google.gr/books/about/Experiences_in_Translatio...
on “Microsoft turns spoken English into spoken Mandarin – in the same voice” ↗That's a great book. I've just started reading I Am A Strange Loop by Hofstadter and it's promising. Also by Hofstadter: Le Ton beau de Marot was a good read. GEB is the big one, but if you like his style - probably worth checking out some of the others. Best to get print books for this particular author though.
on “Ask HN: What are your favorite books? I'm bored” ↗If the nuances of the different translations appeal to you, Douglas Hofstadter's "Le Ton beau de Marot" is a must-read.
on “The Wonderfully Elusive Chinese Novel” ↗…Starship & The Canoe (Kenneth Brower) The Size of Lumber (Nicholson Baker) Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (Shunryu Suzuki) Deschooling Society (Ivan Illich) Moby Dick (Herman Melville) Bolo'Bolo (P.M.) Le Ton beau de Marot (Douglas Hofstadter) Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (James Lovelock) Mouse or Rat: Translation as Negotiation (Umberto Eco) Neuromancer (William Gibson) The Intelligent Investor (Benjamin Graham)…
on “Ask HN: Best books you've read in 2015” ↗