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 Clement 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,jumping through two tough hoops at once.In the next few
years, he not only did many of his own translations of Marot's
poem, but also enlisted friends, students, colleagues, family,
noted poets, and translators,even 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 Marot's 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 poetry,but 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 Pushkin's Eugene Onegin , Dante's Inferno,
Salinger's Catcher in the Rye , Villon's Ballades, Nabokov'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 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.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
