Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language by Douglas R. Hofstadter

Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language Reviews

• 
  Scott

  Le ton beau
  de Marot —
  Quite a read.
  You won’t speed
  Through this book.
  Take a look,
  Word lovers.
  ‘Tween its covers,
  Poems, songs,
  Thoughts thereon,
  Make it full.
  Beautiful-
  ly typeset.
  Author gets
  How frames blend
  As words wend
  Through the brain.
  Can’t explain
  Why it’s great
  But to state
  Professeur
  Hofstadter’s
  Writing’s good.
  So I would
  Recommend,
  (To friends, lend)
  Le ton beau
  de Marot.
• 
  Edward

  In which Hofstadter attempts to bottle lightning a second time. But where Gödel, Escher, Bach excelled in its loose and free-associative style, in its detailed probing of diverse disciplines, which become interrelated in surprising an interesting ways, Le Ton Beau De Marot feels like a deep dive into a comparatively shallow pool. Hofstadter bottoms-out fairly quickly, and spends a lot of time treading water, paddling aimlessly in great circles. The subject matter (or at least the author’s treatment of it) does not justify this level of detail.
  
  That’s not to say that Le Ton Beau De Marot doesn’t contain a host of fascinating insights into the wonders of language and translation – it absolutely does, and for these the book is worth reading. But it is heavily mired in the author’s self-indulgences. The book is deeply autobiographical – frustratingly so. It is bogged down with endless personal anecdotes, many of which are only tangentially related to the subject at hand (If you open the book to just about any random page, you will find it heavily peppered with the pronoun “I”). Frankly, most of these vignettes are not particularly interesting, and make the author seem self-absorbed. It’s unfortunate, but what primarily came across to me in this book was not a love of language, but a writer in love with the sound of his own words and thoughts.
  
• 
  David

  Another one of my all-time favorite books, this is by the author of "Godel, Escher, Bach". Impossible to categorize accurately, it's a kind of extended riff on the difficulties and challenges of translation, carried out with a kind of beguiling enthusiasm. It shares the playfulness that characterized "Godel, Escher, Bach" but I found it more accessible and more interesting.
  
  Starting with a single unifying thread that winds through the entire book (various* translations of a single 28-line poem by the French author Clement Marot, Hofstadter weaves a fascinating tapestry about the challenges facing a translator. There is a whole chapter dedicated to translations of Eugene Onegin; another discusses various efforts at translating Dante. Along the way there are fun digressions about such challenges as translating lipograms (text written with the constraint that one or more letters of the alphabet are never used), the paradoxical usefulness of writing under constraints of various kinds, be they artificial as in lipogrammatic writing, or metrical constraints, as in Pushkin, Dante, or the sonnets of Shakespeare, difficulties in writing translation software, linguistic issues such as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis**, how one would translate a 'dirty' joke to a clean version, while preserving the humor.
  
  *: I haven't counted, but there must be at least 50 different translations. Oddly enough, the accumulation of so many is not boring, but fascinating - Hofstadter's boyish enthusiasm helps to charm.
  **: (very) roughly, the linguistic notion that how we think is constrained by language. Dismissed by Steven Pinker in his book "The Language Instinct", though I think Pinker's case is less than convincing.
  
  A fascinating tour-de-force, it is also the kind of book one can dip in to from time to time and be entertained by any one of its chapters.
• 
  Isis

  (addition 5/12/2010)
  
  I would mark this book six stars, if I could. This was my third (or fourth? Or fifth?) trip through, and I still think it's amazing, brilliant, quirky and fun. Basically, it asks: What should stay constant across translation of a work? Translation is normally thought of as to do with plot, mood, connotations of individual words – but what about rhyming, scansion, lipogrammatic constraints? Is transculturation a thing to avoid, or to work toward? If your various constraints conflict, how do you pick which to follow?
  
  You can dip into it at any random point and find lots and lots of fascinating tidbits about words, history, authors, AI, how humor works, musical analogy, analogous musings, stylistic analysis of writing, and so on. You'll want to play along, too – as I did for this discussion! (Hint: it's in "Anglo-Saxon.")
  
  
  (Previous review)
  
  This is one of my favorite books ever, and as I just recommended it to someone I thought I'd put it here as well. Hofstadter's examination of translation and transformation taught me that the best translation is not necessarily the most literal one, nor even the one that captures the most exact meaning, and that transformation of text is indeed a creative activity. (Heh - I read this before I even heard of fanfiction!) There are a lot of thoughtful ideas in here about how humans use language - how stories and poems are bigger than just the words in them, how meaning is only one dimension of text. Perhaps it's not as groundbreaking as his "Goedel, Escher, Bach," but it's more approachable for non-computer-science types, I think, and I like it better.
• 
  Bruce

  Count me among those who regard
  Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid as a masterpiece. Le Ton beau, however, is Hofstadter gone overboard. Wow, does the man need an editor. This book is so exasperating: occasional drips of insight interspersed with ramblings, ephemera, and juvenile verse, all in the name of exploring as many aspects of language translation problems as may have occurred to the author during an artificially prolonged compositional process.
  
  That last is Hofstadter's armslength observation, not my assumption. The author begins his work with irrelevant poignancy by telling us that the recent death of his beloved wife was what prompted this writing. It's an oddment of shared intimacy, as the book can scarcely be considered an homage to her her interests or accomplishments. If anything, the matter-of-fact dedication leaves the impression that Hofstadter used this book as an excuse to escape, sublimate, or suppress his grief for as long as possible.
  
  So he talks in his prologue about holing himself up in a bungalow for more than a year, alienating himself from the company of others to endlessly rewrite and reorganize chapters and sections as new ideas occur to him. Far less than impress, it conjures the tragic image of a man in denial essentially orphaning his school-age children at what must have been their moment of greatest emotional vulnerability. It's a confession that casts a pall over the casual tone of the book as a whole, not to mention its sprawl. Your father has gone bye-bye, kids, you'll just have to salvage whatever you can find to eat in the fridge.
  
  To make matters worse, the work's substance is not nearly worthy of its backstory. Ton Beau's foundational intellectual conceit is the challenge of properly translating poetry and exploring what if anything properly means in this context. So Hofstadter dissects Clement Marot's poetic bon-bon Ma Mignonne (reproduced in full on the book's cover), taking it through multiple variations -- some by others, but most by himself -- to demonstrate the ultimate futility of any exercise to generate a perfect reproduction of any poem in another language... Hofstadter defines the perfect translation as an identical copy of the rhyme, meter, syntax, quanta of syllables, assonance, consonance, and semantic substance, with neither addition nor subtraction.
  
  Of course, any change is tautologically incommensurate with identity; you don't need to read all the examples to grasp this concept any more than you need to read his largely vacuous line-by-line annotations/explanations of what he thinks each translator has done well or poorly. About five well-chosen samples would have sufficed to get his point across, and a good editor might well have come in handy here. Unfortunately this author refuses to be edited, even going so far as to alert the reader with self-conscious pride that he insists on full control of his work, to the point of delivering untouchable, pre-typeset manuscripts including all selections of fonts, kerning, and font size.
  
  As much an act of obsessive-compulsive behavior as hubris, Hofstadter nonetheless manages to marble a bit of thought-provoking meat in the midst of this mountain of fat. Among the ideas Hofstadter tosses out are:
  
  - On languages as independent structures such that disparate languages even those from neighboring regions do not form a topologically-pure continuum (p. 345). "An expressive structure created in French will not just continuously transform like a piece of rubber being stretched or bent into the equivalent structure in German. Rather ... the fragments must be put back together in radically different ways... each one analogous to the choice of an item from a restaurant menu so huge that one can never scan all of it...." All translations therefore require conscious choice and selection.
  
  - The challenge of translating language-dependent literature, considering the futility of creating a word-for-word translation of a Stanislaw Lem story about a machine that destroys all things beginning with the letter 'n' including science (na'uk in Polish), there being no English word with the same meaning beginning with 'n' (p. 56).
  
  - The fact that connotations evolve over time, considering the gender of hypothetical people referenced as "you guys" (pp. 20-23). Does a translator render a text in its original or current temporal context and to which context in the target language?
  
  - The problem of layered meanings, an especially vexing issue for would-be translators of poetry (pp. 81-82). What to do with puns, grammatical errors, syntactical ambiguities, and other wordplay?
  
  - The meaning of meaning itself as something ineffable "where even the tiniest epsilon... is not identical to zero" (p. 519). Here it's worth quoting Hofstadter at length to point up his hobbyhorses.

  [T]he quest to develop an artificially intelligent entity is a marvelous, mystical quest, in which we are brought face to face with the deepest enigmas concerning our own nature. What is language? What is music? What are concepts? What are words? What is thinking? What is insight? How does analogy work? What is memory? How do we learn? How do we forget? How are mistakes linked to invention? What is perception? What is consciousness? What is creativity? What is artistic beauty? How do we mirror other minds inside our own? What are empathy and compassion? How does a soul come out of inanimate matter? What is a self? What does the word "I" represent?

  Hofstadter poses these questions to defend the validity of exploring and developing AI in the context of a critique of a philosopher's thought experiment without once considering the applications of information theory that have made such explorations possible. The author touches upon the reductio ad absurdam of chatbots and thesaurus-powered mechanical translators, but never thinks to mention the works and successfully applied theories of Claude Shannon or Ed Thorp.
  
  
  John Searle is the philosopher whose writings Hofstadter goes to extraordinary lengths to vilify, and in doing so offers a neat takedown of the "Chinese Room" (a box in which a non-Chinese speaker manages to render perfect English translations simply by following detailed, written instructions). Whence the intelligence in this design? Of course it lies in the original authorship of the impeccable instructions and the ability to faithfully follow them, appreciating that doing so in a reasonable time actually requires impractically vast reference materials and the superhuman speed to navigate them. Okay, but why reproduce Searle's essay in "Anglo-Saxon" (for Hofstadter, this is English stripped of any word containing the letter "E") to make the argument? Sure, it's a neat stunt -- I loved
  Gilbert Adair's masterful translation of
  Georges Perec's
  La Disparition (see
  A Void) -- but it doesn't enhance his critique. Rather it presents one more example here of an otherwise brilliant thinker who has apparently lost his mind.
• 
  Hillary

  Perfect for total compulsives, among whom I number myself when it comes to language. One of my favorite details of this book is when Hofstadter admits that he rewrote pages over and over again so that they would end in a happy place physically--that is, not only no widows or orphans (a huge no-no from my stance), but many pages end with the end of a sentence. It's also witty, light, insightful about translation from many different views of that task, a little bit sad, personal but not stupid, well-designed, and smart. Plus, if you don't have the urge to do your own translation (or a couple) after finishing it, you have a dead soul. The late Hugh Kenner contributes one of my favorites, which includes an awesome visual pun on Rx.
• 
  James Swenson

  Some fascinating insights on the difficulty of translation, along with examples showing that apparently untranslatable texts often aren't. "Borges thinks you should try a little harder." (p. 539)
  
  Hofstadter interleaves a variety of surprising sample texts with reflections on his life with his recently deceased wife and with extended attacks on the work of
  John Searle and
  Vladimir Nabokov.
  
  Hofstadter says interesting things, many of them several times each. When you have won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction, it is probably harder to find an editor who can advise you to shorten your new book by 75-100 pages, but it would have been worth the trouble in this case. I was charmed by the poem "A une Damoyselle malade" by Clément Marot -- the translation of which inspires the present book -- when I first saw it, but now I don't want to see it again for at least five years.
  
  [Edit:] By the way, you can see the poem in French, and judge how hard it might be to translate,
  here.
• 
  Sean

  I loved Godel Escher Bach, and a couple of Hofstadter's other books too, but this one, no. His playfulness with words works wonderfully in the context of explaining mathematical concepts, but in explaining poetry and translation, his playfulness has all the depth of a computer scientist making puns. Which is what this is.
  
  There are smart observations here and there. That's the good part. But this book is huge. It could be cut down by a third and still be redundant. Worse still is what a pompous ass Hofstadter comes across as. His "rules" for what makes poetry poetry are insane. When he talks about music you'll be pulling your hair out. He calls out other translators and authors for being opinionated jerks, then turns into an opinionated jerk, smug and self-righteous--when the topic is the art of translation.
  
  In the same paragraph he'll talk about translation as a hugely subjective art, then trash a translater for not obeying the "correct" aspects of a poem. It's absurd. He should stick to what he knows: computer science, math, AI.
• 
  Rochellic

  The book started off incredible and slowly tapered off in quality - to the point where I never want to hear the name 'Clement Marot' or read the phrase 'Ma Mignonne ever again. This is a 600-page behemoth that could have been a 20-page essay. There are brilliant and stimulating insights about translation hidden beneath pages and pages of tautological and pretentious garbage - the tone that Hofstadter adopts is also infuriating, one gets the impression that he believes himself to be writing the most intelligent and ingenious book ever written.
  
  The book itself is structured as commentary sandwiched between 88 translations of the same poem. I was entirely on board till about number 35 or so, which is where I suspect Hofstadter ran out of material, and what follows from there is an exhausting deluge of contrived, unsubstantiated musings which are frankly trivial and pedantic. Although, what really killed the book for me was the sheer number of mundane, unrelated anecdotes and tangents that Hofstadter peppers in which add hundreds of pages of redundant verbiage you have to wade through.
  
  Hofstadter is Icarus, his goals were too lofty and he tried to do too much. In alternating between social commentary, translation, classical music, literature, and artificial intelligence he fails at all and the book goes right down with him.
• 
  saïd

  I never want to read this poem again, so thanks for that, I guess. Also this book absolutely did not have to be over 600 pages long; a third of that would have sufficed, although Hofstadter includes over 80 translations of the poem.
  
  The function of this book is straightforward: Hofstadter, using Clément Marot's poem "À une Damoyselle Malade," illustrates and discusses the impossibilities of translation from one language (and the associated context, semantics, syntax, mentality, time, etc.) to another. The poem itself is brief—only 28 lines, each a single anapestic foot—and relatively simple in language (in the original French), being a short and sweet little letter to Jeanne d'Albret, the daughter of Marguerite d'Angoulême, who was sick. Here is the original, which perfectly illustrates Marot's "tombeau" (ton beau):

  Ma mignonne,
  Je vous donne
  Le bon jour ;
  Le séjour
  C'est prison. 5
  Guérison
  Recouvrez,
  Puis ouvrez
  Votre porte
  Et qu'on sorte 10
  Vitement,
  Car Clément
  Le vous mande.
  Va, friande
  De ta bouche, 15
  Qui se couche
  En danger
  Pour manger
  Confitures ;
  Si tu dures 20
  Trop malade,
  Couleur fade
  Tu prendras,
  Et perdras
  L'embonpoint. 25
  Dieu te doint* [donne]
  Santé bonne,
  Ma mignonne.

  Hofstadter includes 88 translations, most of them his own (although not all—notably, one is a translation done by Robert French, a professional translator). Much of the book is occupied with Hofstadter's opinions as to what constitutes a "good" and/or "accurate" translation, of the poem but also in general. For example, he identifies the following eight key characteristics of the poem that (he believes) a translator should take into account when translating:

  1. It is made up of 28 lines;
  2. Each line has 3 syllables;
  3. The stress falls on the last of these syllables;
  4. It is a series of rhyming couplets;
  5. The semantic couplets are out of phase with the rhyming couplets;
  6. After line 14 the formal vous is replaced by the more colloquial tu;
  7. The last line echoes the first;
  8. The poet slips his own name into the poem.

  Obviously, I disagree with much of Hofstadter's opinions—and this book is, after all, predominantly occupied with Hofstadter's opinions—but it was fascinating to see the immense variation in the finished products. And that's only from French to English! Unfortunately, despite how much I could relate to the struggle of translating poetry, and how much I loved that little poem itself, I did not want to sit through over 600 pages of Hofstadter sucking his own dick about how clever and learnèd he was. As I mentioned before, the book could easily have been 200 pages and accomplished the same message, probably even with as many examples included—each translation could certainly have been restricted to two pages apiece, and the overall effect would have been much less dull. A stricter editor wouldn't have been amiss.
• 
  W.C.

  I really can't say anything about this book that hasn't already been said. This is the more organic and human sequel to GEB, much denser and more complex, takes forever to read, and is deeply moving and personal in a way the whimsy of GEB never gets. A book for GEB lovers to read when they get out of college.
• 
  Ed Erwin

  Covers many very interesting topics, such as language, translation, and machine learning, yet was really hard to get through because it meanders on too long on each one.
  
  Though I skimmed some chapters, I'm glad I pushed all the way through, because it led me to a realization. He had the same realization, so I'll quote: "It was my own love for elegant structure that attracted me to poetry ... and yet ironically, for decades I considered myself to be ... a non-lover of poetry, someone baffled and mystified by poetry.... I have finally arrived at a different conclusion, however: that I am a lover of poetry, that there is much bad poetry in the world, that much of it is nonetheless highly touted, and that my not being able to relate to highly-touted bad stuff cowed me into thinking I was a philistine."
  
  Since I started this book mainly because I was interested in the topic of translation, I was surprised to come away with such a renewed interest in poetry.
  
  I won't take any shots at anyone who enjoys free verse. But for me, as for Hofstadter, what makes poetry interesting is being able to actually hear the effects of the constraints of rhyme and rhythm and syllable counts while still being able to easily understand the literal meaning of the text. The words shouldn't be too obscure and the syntax can't be twisted and distorted very far just to fit the rhyme. It is hard work to write poetry that works that way. Yet when it succeeds, it looks so easy in comparison to the serious poetry, that the achievement is too often overlooked.
  
  Maybe this is the mathematician/scientist/programmer in me that loves clear structure. But that is who I am and it colors what I like in music and art as well. Our way of looking at things is different from, say, the composers of the romantic era or poets of free verse, but just as valid. Just as minimalism has brought back audible patterns to serious music, I hope for a re-birth of audible patterns in serious poetry.
  
  What was most illuminating were the many side-by-side excerpts from four different translations of Eugene Onegin into English. They were presented first without naming the translators and without saying which were the ones most highly praised. Just like the author, I came to find that only one of them really worked. It had the right rhythm and rhyme and most importantly was clearly understandable. It turns out to be the translation by James Falen, and that is surely the one I will read if I ever decide to tackle Onegin.
  
  A serious bit of editing could have improved this book. The author admits to adding and subtracting text for the sole purpose of making page boundaries line-up the way he wants, and I suspect that is part of what makes this book such a slog; he will insert superfluous text here and there just to push the chapter-break down half a page. I have myself when using LaTeX given-in to the temptation to play such games with the text. But just as following the constraints of sonnet form, for example, can force some to twist their language out of shape, these constraints forced the author to pad sections that would have been better without it.
  
• 
  Tandava Graham

  I’ve made it a good slog of the way through this mighty tome of a book, but at the moment it’s just not engrossing enough to merit the remaining time required to finish it, and I have much more urgent things on my reading list now. I’ll keep a bookmark in it, though, and hopefully come back to finish it sometime.
  
  A review so far:
  
  This could legitimately be called two separate books. If you want to read just the “Poems” sections, exploring all the different translation options, I think that would be perfectly coherent, interesting, and instructive all on its own. This was what drew me in in the first place. The chapters in between (which actually make up the bulk of the book) tackle topics of varying degrees of relevance in excruciating detail. Some of it will be fascinating, some boring, depending on your interest, though most of it could probably be trimmed by about half.
  
  Hofstadter is clearly a brilliant polymath and uses this book to just revel in being so. I can’t go so far as to call him pretentious or boastful, because he’s just so clearly enjoying himself the whole time. But I do get rather tired of him constantly enjoying himself. That’s not what I’m here for. And he has a tendency to try to one-up everyone, beyond the point where it’s interesting or useful. For example, he praises Tom Lehrer’s brilliance in the way he found a rhyme for “orange” in a song. But then he goes and writes five more rhymes for it using exactly the same trick, which very successfully moves us from admiring to bored in only ten lines.
  
  Still, there’s a lot of very interesting stuff to think about in here if you’re interested in poetry, translation, or any remotely related subject.
• 
  Philip Kromer

  Le Ton Beau is somewhat rambling, doesn't reach the mind-blowing heights of _Godel, Escher, Bach_ (nothing does), and has enough literature to turn off science geeks and enough science to turn off literary folk. Yet I come back to the ideas within it more frequently than most all of the books I've read. I recommend it to anyone who enjoyed GEB and wants more.
  
  The central device is an obscure but wonderful poem by a 15th century French monk: a simple, elegant, universal, timeless text. The book demonstrates myriad iterations on what it means to "translate" a word, using several dozen independent translations contributed by experts, amateurs, thinkers, machines, into English, into French, into modernity, into code, along any surprising number of parallel lines that Hofstadter so excels at seeing.
  
  Above all I took two things away from this text. One is that from then on I always purchase two independent translations of any foreign work. It's stunning how distinct you'll find they are and how much literary artistry a good translation requires. The second is an enduring affection for "Booze and the Blowens", a translation of a poem by F Villon into thieve's cant. Enjoy magician Ricky Jay's performance here
  http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h6L9oc2uGY4
• 
  Deiwin Sarjas

  The prose is playful and so is the verse. Translated or not. Hofstadter definitely has what he reckons a good translator should - a sense of humor. The sense that allows one to take more risks and so arrive at a better translation, whether others (notably Nabakov) would rather call it a paraphrase or not. I was continuously surprised by little wordplay here and little rhyme and rhythm there, often in sentences that could have worked just as well in their dull counterpart forms in any other book. Truly a joy to read.
  
  It was also tangibly heartfelt and personal. The stories of Carol (his missed wife) and the kids, of Italy and France, of music and trans-lation, transportation, and -culturation of his own previous works. All of these personal vignettes mixed with insightful attempts at generalization and impressive display of reflection.
  
  He inspired me to also try and render Marot's ditty into Estonian, my native tongue, without speaking a word of French myself. All I currently have is a stab at a literal trisyllabic version, which forgoes rhyme, and a half of a slant-rhyming one. He'd probably shun me for even trying the latter, but rhyming in Estonian is all too new to me and one has to start somewhere.
• 
  Tom

  I finally finished this book over the weekend. I've been reading it for years--it's that kind of book. And it was sitting on my bookshelf for quite a while until I picked it up again last year.
  I told someone it was one of my favorite books of all time to read. I know that sounds awkward but what I mean is that I like reading Douglas Hofstadter. He's a bit of a rambler but has such an interesting mind that I don't mind being taken hither and yon by him.
  This book is essentially about translation and the ways that humans and computers use language. But the thing that makes the book more than just a treatise about the psychology of language is that Hofstadter's wife had died suddenly of a brain tumor just shortly before the book was published and the book as much a tribute to her as anything else.
  Hofstadter is fascinated by patterns as evidenced in his most famous book "Godel, Escher and Bach." The present title takes a "simple" poem by an obscure 16th century French author Clement Marot and shows how translation works (or doesn't).
  If you love language and have an open mind and take your time with this book it will reward you with a wonderfully pleasurable experience.
• 
  David Reiley

  This is one of my favorite books ever. How do you translate poetry? How do you respect constraints of rhyme and meter? Do you have to let the literal meaning slip? If so, how? What kinds of creativity are involved?
  
  Lots of great examples of constraints producing artistic creativity, including poems (lipograms) where the authors don't let themselves use certain vowels and consonants. A very engaging and satisfying read.
• 
  Jessica

  I kind of can't wait to clasp my grubby hands on this book.
• 
  Marjorie

  Perhaps I am too tired to give it its due.
• 
  Thibaut Hochons

  This is a beautiful and unusual book. Hofstadter is best known for "Gödel, Escher, Bach" - a surprising comparative exploration of the work of the individuals listed in its title, in the service of illuminating the mechanisms of human consciousness and cognition. This book, too, is a kaleidoscope of topics, but - unlike "GEB" - it wasn't written to expose a pre-determined core thesis. Rather, this massive opus (800 pages and counting) seems to have grown by accretion from a seemingly modest seed: the translation into English of a short, sweet 1537 French poem by Clément Marot. Hoftstadter explains how he grew obsessed with the challenge of translating the poem, and - from there - fell into the rabbit hole of analyzing translation in general.
  
  To explore a broad range of options, Hoftstadter shared Marot's poem with dozens of his friends and students, independently asking them to come up with their own translations. The book compiles and compares the result of their efforts, but goes far beyond that - so much that translations only ended up making up a small percentage of the book. The rest is reflection on questions and topics evoked by the translators' peculiar art. For example: how to translate constrained writing (ranging from puns, to verse, to "La Disparition"- Georges Perec's French-speaking novel in which the letter E never appears)? How much should one transpose tone and vocabulary to make a text accessible - at the risk of masking the original culture of the writer? What can computers translate, and what cannot they yet? (Hofstadter much more recently wrote a hilarious essay on Google Translate) Is there anything untranslatable? More broadly, can one translate not only between languages, but between times, styles, personalities? Does the soul and personality of dead people meaningfully survive - in a partial and translated form - in the mind of those they influenced? That point is especially poignant, as the book doubles as moving love letter to Carol, the author's wife, prematurely deceased of brain cancer.
  
  Some reviewers were bothered by Hofstadter's highly personal tone - much of the book is made up of personal anecdotes or reveries. The book sure is long, and it is true that Hofstadter seldom seems to have an idea that he doesn't find worth writing. It felt to me like a long conversation with an unusually chatty and inspired friend - with enough fascinating stories and ideas to forgive the occasional long-winded stretch. One could dream of a book that would be the translation of this one into a more compact and concise form, but this is the only version we have, and its idiosyncrasy is part of its charm. Not perfect, but delightful.
• 
  Gary Lang

  This book is about the arts and sciences of translation – across time, cultures, and languages. Machine translation is discussed which leads to a mid-90s survey of AI. The context here is that AI relies on symbol manipulation so the techniques involved in translating poetry such as the poem that gives the book its title are similar to some techniques for developing machine understanding.
  
  While reading the book, you can’t help wondering if Hofstadter went obsessively 500 pages into this cul-de-sac to distract himself from his wife’s then-recent passing away. This is explained in detail in several long asides, along with his clear inability not to think about her no matter where he is in the narration.
  
  Not one of Hofstadter's most accessible books but certainly his most human writing.
• 
  Don Heiman

  Basic Books published Douglas Hofstadter’s book “Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language” in 1997. This amazing book explains the subtle art of translating writings across many languages by reflecting the music of poetry, culture, literature, geography, and time. His work is full of humor, analysis, and autobiography. For me, it was best that I read his book in bite size chunks to better savor his observations and style. The French artist Clement Marot’s 1537 poem “Ma Mignonne” is a 28 line wonder and forms the basis of Hofstadter’s foray into the world of language translations. (P)
  
• 
  Jocelyn Veevers

  Hofstadter is excellent at exploring and explaining the things that are within his domains of expertise (languages, classical music, AI). The thing that turned me off was his screeds later in the book about modern poetry and rock music, which are media which have very interesting formal qualities, regardless of what Hofstadter believes. Overall, a wonderful philosophical exploration of translation.
• 
  Deborah Milledge

  The most fabulous achievement! I read this in bed while recovering from surgery and therefore had time to engage fully with the exercises dotted through the book. I am a linguistics graduate, singer in many languages and also have a programming background, so Hofstadter absolutely chimed with me. Truly a life-changer!
  I went on to read Hofstadter’s much more famous Gödel, Escher, Bach, which had nothing like the same impact on me.
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  Chet Morrison

  I'd give this one six stars if I could. And I would enthusiastically push back on those who thought it overlong; I differ in that I find it packed with interesting a brilliant insights from beginning to end; I believe it is long because the author has so much to say and I wouldn't shorten it by a page. The last chapter when he writes about the death of his wife...still moves me to tears when I read it.
  Devour the whole book in its glorious length is my take