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July 20, 1997
My Little Chickadee
By ROBERT ALTER

Douglas Hofstadter takes a 16th-century French poem addressed to a young girl and translates it every which way

Read David Hofstadter's Response to This Review


  • More on Douglas Hofstadter from The New York Times Archives

    LE TON BEAU DE MAROT
    In Praise of the Music of Language.
    By Douglas R. Hofstadter.
    632 pp. New York:
    Basic Books. $30.


    Douglas R. Hofstadter, author of the widely celebrated ''Godel, Escher, Bach,'' has produced a quirky, personal, amusing, sometimes touching and often exasperating book about the mysteries of translation. ''Le Ton Beau de Marot'' does not offer a continuous argument -- Hofstadter himself refers to it as ''my ruminations on the art of translation'' -- but rather a long sequence of sundry reflections parceled out in packages of a page or two under boldface rubrics that are usually whimsical and often punning. This eccentric structure allows the writer to talk about pretty much whatever he wants to, some of it only loosely associated with translation. There is a good deal of autobiography in all this, with special weight given to what proves to be an affecting celebration of the author's beloved wife and a wrenching account of her death at an early age four years ago from a brain tumor.

    The spine of the book, running intermittently through the ruminations, is a French poem written in 1537 by Clement Marot, ''A une Damoyselle Malade.'' (The French title of the book, invoking Marot, is a pun: it means ''Marot's elegant tone'' but is phonetically identical with le tombeau de Marot, which has the sense of ''a memorial for Marot.'') The poem is a charming social gesture, to a little girl who has fallen ill, by a playful, avuncular Marot, who encourages her to get well. It is composed in rhyming couplets, in lines of only three syllables, with the last line, ''Ma mignonne'' (''My sweetie''), identical with the first. Much of its appeal lies in its poised formal concision and its witty musicality.

    Hofstadter begins with the French text of the poem, for which he provides four different approaches to a literal translation. In the course of the book, he proposes another 60-plus versions of the poem, the majority reproducing the metrics and the rhyme scheme of the original. Most of these are his own, some are by friends and colleagues and family members, a few (which he concedes are grotesque) were generated by computers programmed for translation. There are even translations of the poem into Italian, German, Russian and modern French (all of which Hofstadter then translates into English). The range of the English versions includes Elizabethan English, 1920's American slang, the diction of pop lyrics and the language of rap. Thus Marot's initial ''Ma mignonne'' variously emerges in English as ''My sweet dear,'' ''Honey bun,'' ''Sugar lump,'' ''Turtle dove,'' ''Chickadee,'' ''Pal petite'' and much else.

    The point of this process of restless retranslation is to offer a kaleidoscopic view of the endless permutations of verbal, imagistic and tonal possibilities in transposing a poem from one cultural context to another. Along the way, there are some nice local perceptions about the challenges of translation. I was particularly struck, recalling some of my own struggles, by Hofstadter's notion of a '' 'rickety bridge' effect . . . in which a first spanning of a translation chasm, however modest, somehow facilitates further spannings of greater strength, substance and subtlety.'' But his generalizations about translation also involve a good deal of reinvention of the wheel, something reflected in the fact that of all the developing literature on translation theory of recent decades he refers only to George Steiner's ''After Babel'' and Willis Barnstone's ''Poetics of Translation.''

    Hofstadter, who is a computer scientist with training in physics and mathematics, takes manifest delight in playing with words, has a competence in 10 or more foreign languages and exhibits a certain appreciation for poetry. This appreciation, however, has very evident limits, and these in turn skew what he has to say about translation. He understands little of the stylistic or imaginative subtleties of literature that are not expressed in explicit prosodic structures. He categorically dismisses all free verse as esthetically repellent and a betrayal of poetry. He is prepared to consign Robert Pinsky to the ninth circle of hell for translating Dante with slant rhyme and not preserving the terza rima scheme. He permits himself a 20-page tantrum against Nabokov for objecting to verse translation, in the course of which he actually characterizes ''Lolita'' as ''popular pedophilic pornography'' and describes the exquisitely lyric ''Speak, Memory'' as ''quasi-photographic.''

    As a writer who has reflected deeply on artificial intelligence, Hofstadter conceives thought -- and, it would appear, imagination as well -- as a process of ''spotting hidden patterns, extracting deep gists, forming high abstractions, making subtle analogies.'' In consonance with this notion of thinking as the detection of pattern, he elsewhere describes his own activity of translation as coming up with English equivalents ''after a little poling-around in my mental lexicon and my bag of word-manipulation techniques.'' Word manipulation, in fact, dominates the book, which symptomatically devotes many pages to the exploration of verbal puzzles such as anagrams, palindromes, lipograms and acrostics, all conceived to be intrinsically linked with translation. This focus on sheer puzzle solving leads Hofstadter to a whole series of excruciating versions of the Marot poem because he concentrates almost exclusively on the word-juggling challenge of transposing the poem into a new cultural idiom while reproducing the original prosody. Thus: ''My petite / Pet, you're sweet -- / Have a hug. / Has some bug / Laid you up? / Made you up- / chuck a lot? / Knuckle not / Under, but / Undercut / Your disease.'' Intended to be funny, this strikes me as embarrassingly awkward, leaving nothing of the delightful Marot but the prosody and the address to a sick girl.

    The ultimate weakness of ''Le Ton Beau de Marot'' is precisely the poem it has taken as its paradigm. The Marot poem is, after all, no more than a charming trifle, with the charm clearly inseparable from its elegant form. As such, it does lend itself to inventive transpositions to other times, places and stylistic registers. Some of these transpositions -- though clearly not the one I've just quoted -- can be quite engaging in their replication of Marot's formal structure in a surprisingly different stylistic vehicle, and thus they appear to confirm Hofstadter's contention that poetry can always be translated, formally and thematically, if the translator is sufficiently determined and resourceful. But what if the text to be translated had been a truly great French poem following an intricate metrical and rhyme scheme -- say, Baudelaire's ''Invitation au Voyage''? When a rich, imaginatively realized world is called up by the language of the poem, when the original words exhibit a sensuous density, a plangency of associative echoes, joined with a subtle musicality, it takes a good deal more than a bag of word-manipulation techniques to produce a satisfying version in another language. Even so accomplished a translator of poetry as Richard Wilbur was able to offer no more than a loose approximation of the experience of Baudelaire's poem and of its incantatory music.

    Douglas Hofstadter has valid things to say about one-half the task of literary translation -- the juggling of verbal combinations and permutations as the translator teeters along the high-wire bridge from one language to another. What lies beyond his ken is the fundamental fact that literature is not merely an articulation of patterns but a deep imagining of the world through words, so that words themselves, in the hands of a great writer, attain an authority, a complexity of interaction, a power of enchantment they do not otherwise possess. To convey this deep imagining in another language requires, as anyone who has tried it must confess, more than even the most patient ingenuity.


    Robert Alter's most recent book is ''Genesis: Translation and Commentary.''


    More on Douglas Hofstadter
    From the Archives of The New York Times

  • Behind the Best Sellers (1980)
    "'Godel, Escher, Bach' is that rarest kind of best seller - a book written out of an obsessive personal need that just happens to fill, in the words of its publisher, a 'great hunger' in large numbers of readers."
  • Exploring the Labyrinth of the Mind, by Douglas Hofstadter (1983)
    "... from the beginning I was fascinated by numbers -- each number, it seemed, had some kind of magical property, and there was a sense of mysticism about it all, of being in tune and in touch with God."
    A profile from The New York Times Magazine
  • Essay: What's Gained in Translation, by Douglas Hofstadter (1996)
    "...what would give me the chutzpah to write about, let alone think I could judge, various English translations of 'Eugene Onegin,' that exemplary Russian novel in verse...?"

    REVIEWS OF:

  • "Godel, Escher, Bach" By Douglas R. Hofstadter (1979)
    To accompany each expository chapter, the author has provided a whimsical dialogue cast in the form of a Bach composition ... Some may find these interludes amusing. For my part, I was strongly reminded that the challenge of writing such a piece is not in throwing the melodies together according to rule, but in making music of them.
  • "Metamagical Themas" By Douglas R. Hofstadter (1985)
    "...a self-referential book, self-conscious to a degree that will charm many and irritate others."
  • "Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies" By Douglas Hofstadter and the Fluid Analogies Research Group (1995)
    "What is creativity? The answer offered here is novel and, ultimately, compelling."


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