Le Ton Beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language (Douglas R. Hofstadter)

• Author: Douglas R. Hofstadter

Condition & Size

• Size: Large (Format C. Typically 13.8x21.6 or 14.0x22 cm)
• Book Type: Hardcover
• CAI Condition Score: 7/10.
• CAI Condition Description: Very Good

About This Book

Villon's ballades, Nobokov'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. 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.