By Douglas R. Hofstadter

Misplaced in an art—the paintings of translation. hence, 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 potential ”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 ebook, which was once sparked a decade in the past whilst Hofstadter, lower than the spell of a beautiful French miniature via 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 few years, he not just did lots of his personal translations of Marot’s poem, but in addition enlisted buddies, scholars, colleagues, relatives, famous poets, and translators—even 3 cutting-edge translation programs!—to try out their hand at this sophisticated challenge.The wealthy harvest is represented the following by means of 88 wildly assorted diversifications on Marot’s little subject. but this slightly scratches the outside of Le Ton beau de Marot, for small teams of those poems exchange with chapters that run all around the map of language and thought.Not simply a collection 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 via a keenness for the track 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 lovely form-content interaction, full of inventive linguistic experiments but continuously crystal-clear, this ebook is intended not just for fans of literature, but additionally for those who desire to be introduced into touch with present principles approximately how creativity works, and who desire to see how today’s computational versions of language and inspiration 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 international, and is bound to impress nice pleasure and heated controversy between poets and translators, critics and writers, and people fascinated with the examine of creativity and its elusive wellsprings.