Le Ton beau de Marot

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

Title

The title is ambiguous. Firstly, it can mean " The beautiful sound of the Lord Marot ", but a Frenchman can also hear " Le tombeau de Marot ", in which case " tombeau " as " grave stone " (see illustration of the book cover ) or as a " work of art, in memory was created on a deceased personality " can be understood.

Content

The individual chapters are preceded by multiple translations of the poem "A une Damoyselle malade " by Clément Marot. Hofstadter calls the poem but "Ma mignonne " after its opening line. Each translation is preceded on the previous page, a detailed comment. In total there are 88 translations, of which a large part of Hofstadter himself, other persons, he has motivated to translation, as well as computer-generated translations. One of the translations in German by Frank Rohde.

One of the central theses of the book is that a poetic text is a marriage between content and form, which must not disconnect a translator by translating only the content and ignoring the form. As a poetic work appropriate translation should be designed, discussed Hofstadter not only based on the poem by Clément Marot, but among other things, also based on 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. Special mention also find the Japanese poetic form haiku and Leipogramme, palindromes and self-referential phrases such as: "This sentence contains five words."

Hofstadter also argues with the question of how much you have to understand in order to make a good translation, or whether it is sufficient to mechanically assemble words by syntactic rules. This leads him to the question of what "understanding" actually is and whether one can develop a computer comparable to the human understanding and awareness. He thinks that this development is possible if computer once reach a complexity that is the complexity of the human brain the same. He was raised in his opinion against Joseph Weizenbaum, who said that the priority of man must necessarily be defended in front of the computer.

Final chapter

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

Werkausgaben

• 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.
• 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.