Normally I'd put this in WoBoGRo, but the subject of this book is a dead match for the description of this forum.

Douglas Hofstadter has done it again, apparently. Or did it again in 1997, and I missed it entirely. I never made it all the way through his 1979 Gödel, Escher, and Bach but have enjoyed chunks of it greatly over the years. His other great oeuvre is Le Ton Beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language. The title means "Marot's beautiful tone", and it's a "jeu de mots" or wordplay on "Le Tombeau de Marot" (Marot's tomb). Marot was a 16thc. poet whose short verse Hofstadter took as epitaph for his late wife.

The [long] work according to poet Alfred Corn "takes a spirited lyric by a little-known poet of the Rennaissance and uses it as a launching pad for one of the most thought-provoking discussions of literary translations I have read." Knowing the author as some of us do, though, it promises to be a romp in a dozen academic fields. He thinks like Miles Davis plays [played]...

I just heard of it via a FLteachers' forum & bought a used copy online. Anyone else heard of it or read it?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: bethree5,

I'd not heard of it. I was familiar with Ravel's Le Tomobeau de Couperin, which has a ton beau or two in it.

I have not read Hofstadter's Ton Beau de Marot (link), but I once skimmed through it at a bookstore. It looked interesting, but there are other of his books that are still on my reading stack. His Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979) is a fantastic book that I've read a couple of times. By coincidence, I am reading a biography, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (2006). The latter Hofstadter's book Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963) is also a favorite of mine and well worth reading. The two Hofstadters are not related as far as I know.