Read e-book online Le Ton Beau De Marot: In Praise Of The Music Of Language PDF

By Douglas R. Hofstadter

ISBN-10: 0465086454

ISBN-13: 9780465086450

Misplaced in an art—the paintings of translation. therefore, in a chic anagram (translation = misplaced in an art), Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and pioneering cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter tricks at what led him to pen a deep own homage to the witty sixteenth-century French poet Clément Marot.”Le ton beau de Marot” actually skill ”The candy tone of Marot”, yet to a French ear it indicates ”Le tombeau de Marot”—that is, ”The tomb of Marot”. That double entendre foreshadows the linguistic exuberance of this publication, which used to be sparked a decade in the past while Hofstadter, lower than the spell of a phenomenal French miniature through Marot, received addicted to the problem of recreating either its candy message and its tight rhymes in English—jumping via tricky hoops at once.In the following couple of years, he not just did lots of his personal translations of Marot’s poem, but additionally enlisted neighbors, scholars, colleagues, kinfolk, famous poets, and translators—even 3 state of the art translation programs!—to attempt their hand at this refined challenge.The wealthy harvest is represented the following through 88 wildly assorted diversifications on Marot’s little topic. but this slightly scratches the outside of Le Ton beau de Marot, for small teams of those poems trade with chapters that run all around the map of language and thought.Not in simple terms a suite of translations of 1 poem, Le Ton beau de Marot is an autobiographical essay, a love letter to the French language, a sequence of musings on existence, loss, and loss of life, a candy bouquet of stirring poetry—but so much of all, it celebrates the unlimited creativity fired by way of a fondness for the tune of words.Dozens of literary issues and creations are woven into the image, together with Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Dante’s Inferno, Salinger’s Catcher within the Rye, Villon’s Ballades, Nabokov’s essays, Georges Perec’s los angeles Disparition, Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate, Horace’s odes, and more.Rife with wonderful form-content interaction, full of inventive linguistic experiments but consistently crystal-clear, this e-book is intended not just for fans of literature, but in addition for those that desire to be introduced into touch with present rules approximately how creativity works, and who desire to see how today’s computational types of language and idea stack up subsequent to the human mind.Le Ton beau de Marot is a glowing, own, and poetic exploration aimed toward either the literary and the medical global, and is bound to impress nice pleasure and heated controversy between poets and translators, critics and writers, and people focused on the examine of creativity and its elusive wellsprings.