Le Ton beau de Marot

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Le Ton beau de Marot : In Praise of the Music of Language is a book by Douglas R. Hofstadter from 1997. It mainly deals with the problem of the translatability of literary texts, but also with problems of understanding in general and the question to what extent computers have or will have the ability to understand. Despite the French title, it is a book written in American English. Hofstadter himself considers the book to be untranslatable and, in contrast to his other books, there is no German translation to date (2012).

title

The title is ambiguous. On the one hand it can mean “The beautiful tone of Mr. Marot”, but a Frenchman can also hear “ Le tombeau de Marot ”, with “ tombeau ” as a “gravestone” (see illustration on the book cover) or as a “work of art that is remembered was created on a deceased personality ”can be understood.

content

The individual chapters are preceded by several translations of the poem “A une Damoyselle malade” by Clément Marot . Hofstadter calls the poem "Ma mignonne" after its opening line. Every translation is preceded by a detailed comment on the previous page. There are a total of 88 translations, a large part of which are by Hofstadter himself, others by people he has motivated to translate, as well as computer-generated translations. One of the translations is in German by Frank Rohde.

One of the central theses of the book is that a poetic text represents a marriage between content and form that a translator cannot separate by only translating the content and ignoring the form. How the appropriate translation of a poetic work should be designed is discussed by Hofstadter not only on the basis of the poem by Clément Marot, but also, among other things. a. also on the basis of case studies of important works such as Pushkin's " Eugene Onegin ", Dante's " Divine Comedy ", poems by Christian Morgenstern or a short story by Stanislaw Lem . The Japanese poem form haiku as well as leipograms , palindromes and self-referential sentences such as E.g. "This sentence contains five words."

Hofstadter also deals with the question of how much one has to understand in order to produce a good translation, or whether it is enough to put words together mechanically according to syntactic rules. This leads him to the question of what “understanding” actually is and whether computers can one day develop an understanding and awareness that is comparable to humans. He believes that this development is possible once computers reach a level of complexity that is equal to the complexity of the human brain. In his view, he opposes Joseph Weizenbaum , who believed that the priority of humans over computers must be defended.

Final chapter

The end with the title “Le Tombeau de ma rose” is dedicated to his wife Carol. Hofstadter describes how his wife unexpectedly fell ill with a brain tumor and died. This conclusion, reminiscent of the book title, allows the conclusion that the entire book is also dedicated to his wife as a “sick young woman” (“une Damoyselle malade”) . The chapter is followed by a photo of his wife, but it is part of a photo. On the other part, which can be seen in the blurb in front of the biographical information, Hofstadter himself is depicted.

Factory editions

  • Douglas R. Hofstadter: Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language . Basic Books, New York 1997, ISBN 0-465-08643-8 (American English).
  • Douglas R. Hofstadter: Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language . Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, London 1997, ISBN 0-7475-3349-0 (American English).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hofstadter: Le Ton beau de Marot. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., London 1997, p. 450
  2. ↑ Hofstadter: Le Ton beau de Marot. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., London 1997, blurb
  3. ↑ Hofstadter: Le Ton beau de Marot. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., London 1997, p. 523
  4. ↑ Hofstadter: Le Ton beau de Marot. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., London 1997, p. 493