Le Ton Beau De Marot: In Praise of The Music of Language Review

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Le Ton Beau De Marot: In Praise of The Music of Language ReviewSome 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?
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