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Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language (ISBN 0-465-08645-4), published by Basic Books in 1997, is a book by Douglas Hofstadter in which he explores the meaning, strengths, failings, and beauty of translation. Image File history File links Le_Ton_beau_de_Marot. ...
Image File history File links Le_Ton_beau_de_Marot. ...
Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is an American academic. ...
Look up translate in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
The title itself is a pun, revealing many of the themes of the work: le ton beau means ‘the beautiful tone’ or ‘the sweet tone’. But the word order is unusual for French; it would be more common to write le beau ton. A French speaker hearing the title spoken would be more likely to interpret it as le tombeau de Marot; where tombeau may mean ‘tomb’ (as per the cover picture), but also ‘a work of art (literature or music) done in memory and homage to a deceased person’. (The title is intended to parallel the title of Maurice Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin.) In a further play on the title, Hofstadter refers to his deceased wife, to whom the book is dedicated as ma rose ("my rose"), and to himself as ton beau ("your dear"). The size of the book must also be a reference to a kind of "physical pun". At around 600 pages the work is a veritable "tome" as well, particularly as the cover image contains a cross headstone and graveyard references. It has been suggested that dajare be merged into this article or section. ...
Joseph-Maurice Ravel (March 7, 1875 – December 28, 1937) was a French composer and pianist, known especially for the subtlety, richness, and poignancy of his music and generally considered to be one of the major composers of the 20th century. ...
Le Tombeau de Couperin is a suite for solo piano by Maurice Ravel, composed between 1914 and 1917. ...
At the surface level, the book treats the difficulties and rewards of translating works (particularly poetry) from one language to another. Diverse translations (usually to English) of a short poem in Renaissance French, Clément Marot's A une Damoyselle malade (referred to as ‘Ma mignonne’ by Hofstadter), serve as reference points for his ideas on the subject. Groups of translations alternate with analysis and commentary on the same throughout the book. However, Hofstadter's reading of the idea of ‘translation’ goes deeper than simply that of translating between languages. Translation between frames of reference — languages, cultures, modes of expression, or indeed between one person's thoughts and another — becomes an element in many of the same concepts Hofstadter has addressed in prior works, such as reference and self-reference, structure and function, and artificial intelligence. Cl ment Marot (1496-1544), was a French poet of the Renaissance period. ...
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A particularly strong theme of this book is the loss of Hofstadter's wife Carol, who died of a brain tumor while the book was being written; she also created one of the numerous translations of Marot's poem presented in the book. In this context the poem dedicated to ‘a sick lady’ gains yet another deeply tragic and personal meaning, even though the translations were started long before her illness was even known. A brain tumor is any intracranial tumor created by abnormal and uncontrolled cell division, normally either found in the brain itself (neurons, glial cells (astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, ependymal cells), lymphatic tissue, blood vessels), in the cranial nerves (myelin-producing Schwann cells), in the brain envelopes (meninges), skull, pituitary and pineal gland...
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