* Introduction: In Joy and in Sorrow * The Life in Rhymes of Clment Marot * For the Love of a Poem from Days Long, Long Gone * How Jolly the Lot of an Oligoglot * The Romantic Vision of Thought as Pattern * Sparkling and Sparkling, Thanks to Constraints * The Subtle Art of Transculturation * The Nimble Medium-hopping of Evanescent Essences * A Novel in Verse * A Vile Non-verse * On Words and Their Magical Halos * Halos, Analogies, Spaces, and Blends * On the Conundrums of Cascading Translation * On Shy Translators and Their Crafty, Silent Art * On the Untranslatable * On the Ununderstandable * Ai Aims, Mi Claims, Sino-room Flames * In Praise of the Music of Language * Conclusion: Le Tombeau de ma rose
Douglas R. Hofstadter is College Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. His previous books are the Pulitzer Prizewinning Godel, Escher, Bach Metamagical Themas, The Mind's I, Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, Le Ton Beau de Marot, and Eugene Onegin.
Using a small but stylistically potent work by 16th-century French poet Clément Marot as a compass, Hofstadter (Gödel, Escher, Bach, LJ 10/1/79) takes us on the sea of issues related to the act and product of translating. The reader encounters questions, such as what is translation? How does the translator cross cultures? Who can judge the validity of the translated product? When is a translation more than repackaging one vocabulary with another? Where does the reader/listener comprehend that there is an original behind the translation? He succeeds in demonstrating his subtitle as a heady metaphor of literal truth: translation is a constant human condition because "words do not have fixed imagery; context is everything." Combining autobiography, scholarly insights on artificial intelligence and a variety of human languages, a contagious sense of play, and incisive writing, Hofstadter's work deserves attention from scholars and alert layreaders. Highly recommended for academic and public library collections.‘Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley P.L., Cal.
Clément Marot (1496-1544) may have been a great French poet, but "A une Da-moyselle malade" is not his best effort. Essentially it's a get-well greeting: sorry that you're sick, but try to eat something and get some fresh air. The ditty serves as a springboard for Hofstadter's thoughts about language, translation, culture and human genius as the author, his friends, translators, scholars and even computer programs contribute to numbing permutations of this one weak lyric. Hofstadter, a professor of artificial intelligence at Indiana University, had bestsellers with the 1980 Pulitzer Prize-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach and a collection of essays reprinted from Scientific American, called Metamagical Themas. Here he is on shakier ground. Hofstadter is not a poet but doesn't hesitate to lay out his opinions: for example, all rhyming translations of "Eugene Onegin" are "excellent" and "fine," but he trashes Vladimir Nabokov's monumental and helpful literal version; he also calls Lolita "pedophilic pornography." And while there are moments of wit, intelligence and uncommon curiosity, there is also a diffuse structure and inflated‘and sometimes hokey‘prose: "In SimTown, many other things can happen including houses being set on fire and goldfish flopping out of their bowls. (I'm leaving off the quotes merely as a shorthand‘I know they aren't real goldfish!)". His cheery gee-whizzery often rings false, and there's probably a good reason for the hollow sound‘in 1993, his wife died of a rare disease, which probably also explains his choice of the verse. This book pays tribute to her, while illustrating the powers and limitations of speech. $60,000 ad/promo. (Apr.)
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