Le Ton beau de Marot
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.
Stats for nerds
27recommend
70mentions
52people
2009–2026years
56% recommend40% neutral4% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I am a Strange Loop is basically GEB but written properly instead of being a random collation of ideas.
Unrusprisingly, since many years went by. But I still love the quirkiness of GEB
(Also, he has other books between the two, I deeply enjoyed Le Ton Beau de Marot, about translations)
- I wasn't a huge fan, to be honest. some good ideas, but overall the book felt self-indulgent. "metamagical themas" is a far better book if you want to read one thing by hofstadter, and "le ton beau de marot" if you want a deep dive into something.
- For those with a passing interest in this topic and quite some patience, "le ton beau de Marót" by Douglas Hofstadter is a whole book of musings about translation, particularly of poetry.
It's a fun book full of interesting linguistic trivia.
The patience would be needed to get through the 50 or so translations of the same poem, all different and "wrong" in some way.
- I enjoyed Hofstadter's _Le ton beau de Marot_, which is precisely about this question; it studies many people's different translations of one particular obscure poem, and asks what properties of the original should be preserved.
- 100%, which reminds me: another example of books created with incredible care are anything by Douglas Hofstadter. The canonical example is Goedel, Escher, Bach; but one that I think is super under-rated is Le Ton beau de Marot -- not only does he care about the content, but the page layout, the font, everything. Truly a labor of love and obsession.
- I found Hofstadter's _Le Ton beau de Marot_ fascinating, and also almost nobody has even heard of it!
