|
Frequently Bought Together
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern by Douglas R. Hofstadter |
by Douglas R. Hofstadter
|
by Douglas R. Hofstadter
|
by Douglas R Hofstadter
|
by Alex Ross
|
Product details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
Product Description
Product Description
Lost in an artthe 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 Clment Marot. Le ton beau de Marot literally means The sweet tone of Marot, but to a French ear it suggests Le tombeau de Marotthat 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 Englishjumping through two tough hoops at once. In the next few years, he not only did many of his own translations of Marots poem, but also enlisted friends, students, colleagues, family, noted poets, and translatorseven three state-of-the-art translation programs!to try their hand at this subtle challenge. The rich harvest is represented here by 88 wildly diverse variations on Marots little theme. Yet this barely scratches the surface of Le Ton beau de Marot, for small groups of these poems alternate with chapters that run all over the map of language and thought. 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 poetrybut 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 Pushkins Eugene Onegin, Dantes Inferno, Salingers Catcher in the Rye, Villons Ballades, Nabokovs essays, Georges Perecs La Disparition, Vikram Seths Golden Gate, Horaces 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 todays computational models of language and thought stack up next to the human mind. Le Ton beau de Marot is a sparkling, personal, and poetic exploration aimed at both the literary and the scientific world, and is sure to provoke great excitement and heated controversy among poets and translators, critics and writers, and those involved in the study of creativity and its elusive wellsprings.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
Precisely one-half a millenium ago - and I mean what I say when I say it's precise - on the twenty-third day of the next-to-last month of the year fourteen hundred fourscore-and-sixteen (a tip of my hat to the Gauls' counting scheme), in the humble French town of Cahors en Quercy, some sixty-odd miles to the north of Toulouse, was born a bright boy christened Clement Marot, the son of an auto-taught poet named Jean and a lady whose life's but a question mark: our focus thus shifts from his folks to their lad. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Precisely one-half a millenium ago - and I mean what I say when I say it's precise - on the twenty-third day of the next-to-last month of the year fourteen hundred fourscore-and-sixteen (a tip of my hat to the Gauls' counting scheme), in the humble French town of Cahors en Quercy, some sixty-odd miles to the north of Toulouse, was born a bright boy christened Clement Marot, the son of an auto-taught poet named Jean and a lady whose life's but a question mark: our focus thus shifts from his folks to their lad. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?
 |
56% buy the item featured on this page: Le Ton Beau De Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language £11.99 |
 |
12% buy Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (20th anniversary edition with a new preface by the author) £13.27 |
 |
11% buy Bad Science £3.58 |
 |
11% buy Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern |
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
 |
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
- Books > Health, Family & Lifestyle > Psychology & Psychiatry
- Books > Poetry, Drama & Criticism > History & Criticism
- Books > Poetry, Drama & Criticism > Poetry
- Books > Reference > Language > Translation & Interpretation
- Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Social Sciences > Linguistics > Reference
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
Your Recent History
(What's this?)|
After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. |
