Le Ton Beau de Marot

"Douglas Hofstadter is famous for being a mathematician who is interested in patterns. In Le Ton Beau de Marot he is taking patterns you find in language and showing how weird and wonderful they are. He is trying to get an idea of how the finite resources there are in each language can somehow express a vast diversity of meaning. He does this through interesting examples. One of the most powerful is when he tries to understand the nature of Russian without learning Russian. What he does is read and compare four different English translations of Eugene Onegin , an extremely structured and witty poem written in Russian by Alexander Pushkin. The translations are similarly structured and witty and the idea is that by comparing the different translations of a given verse of this poem, you can understand what the Russian must be like without actually having to learn it. In one sense it’s nonsense, but in another it’s rather profound. That sort of insight is the kind of thing that animates this extremely long and varied book. The author interplays a number of conceits like this and his other encounters with different languages with a particular short French love poem that was written in early modern France by Clément Marot. The book’s chapters are interspersed by a vast number of different translations – mainly into English – of this one poem, showing the diversity which will come out of attempts to translate it. The title of the book is worthy of the whole because Le Ton Beau de Marot is literally “the beautiful tone of Marot” but indistinguishable when you pronounce it to meaning “the tomb of Marot”. So in some sense the beauties that have come across from translating Marot’s verse have provided his epitaph. Well the book is in praise of the music of language, so I’m not sure what points there would be other than to show you how powerful language is in expressing human thought with a small compass of means. Later on in the book he talks about artificially constrained fiction. A number of writers have been interested in doing things like writing a whole book without using the letter “E”, such as Ernest Wright’s Gadsby and Georges Perec’s La Disparition . You might think that’s impossible to do because it constrains you too much, but you can actually do it. You can find all sorts of other constraints and what he discusses is how powerful a constraint you can put on your expressive power. For example, a metre in poetry is a constraint on how you can express yourself. But to some extent that helps you in poetry, but does it help you more the more you constrain yourself, or does there come a point where you put too heavy a constraint upon yourself and you can no longer actually express anything that you wanted to say? So he’s interested in those types of questions. No, it’s not. The point of his book is that there is so much more there in literature. The very fact that he hasn’t said all that needs to be said only reinforces such points that he has made. As Oscar Wilde once remarked: “Like all those who attempted to exhaust his subject, he succeeded in only exhausting the reader.”"