Un tome beau of a poet

Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language by Douglas R. Hofstadter Bloomsbury 632pp, £30 in UK

Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language by Douglas R. Hofstadter Bloomsbury 632pp, £30 in UK

Coming just after the towering figure of Francois Villon, Clement Marot (14961544) is one of those poets normally left to moulder away in semi-neglect. Until, that is, a book as freakishly remarkable as this comes along and leads him, like some Lebanese hostage, blinking back into the light.

The bookmark that tumbles out of Le Ton beau de Marot gives the text of a dainty little poem called "Ma mignonne"; the book itself is the record of over a decade spent by Hofstadter translating it. He has written a celebration of Marot's musicality or ton beau, but also a tribute or tombeau, not to mention, at well over six hundred pages, a tome beau. Seldom can so big a book have been written on so slender an object: Marot's poem is just twenty-eight lines and eighty-four syllables long. As you would expect from the author of Godel, Escher, Bach, Hof stadter's book is about a lot more than "Ma mignonne". With a De Quinceyan gift for digression, he comperes us through lengthy asides on humorous newspaper headlines ("Prostitues Appeal to Pope"), the joys of e-less novels such as Georges Perec's La Disparation, a poem by Marot about breasts whose first line he translates as "O tit, than egg thou whiter art", vintage Fischer v. Spassky chess games, backwards English or "hsilgnE", Giuseppe Varaldo's monovocalic sonnet reductions of the world's classics ("Confronto ognor lo spocco forforoso" begins a version of Cyrano de Bergerac), burping in bed, and his passion for Chopin's Gflat impromptu and Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. Hofstadter's cracker-barrel enthusiasm is endearing: he is clearly in love with language. He is frequently obsessive too, as when he tells us of having personally chosen all the typefaces in the book, down to specifying Brush Script MT for the subtitle on the cover in honour of his late wife, Carol Brush. But as the Americans say, is he "for real"? Indeed, were it not for the jacket photograph of a grinning Hofstadter frolicking with a tortoise, readers might be forgiven for wondering if he existed at all and wasn't perhaps a cousin of Charles Kinbote, the demented scholar-protagonist of Nabokov's Pale Fire. But exist he does.

Now that you mention him, Nabokov (or "Vivian Darkbloom", as Hofstadter refers to him, remembering Nabokov's anagram built from his own name) comes in for some terrible stick in Le Ton beau de Marot. His translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin is "a vile non-verse . . . so tedious, so awkward, and so utterly sparkless", his sneering dismissal of rival translators an act of "infantesque" petulance. Hofstadter is one to talk. Not content with ticking off Seamus Heaney for the "sorrowful" gawkiness of a translation of a passage from Dante's Inferno, he consigns the hapless Robert Pinsky to the same place for the crime of resorting to slant rhymes. His extravagant praise for a Villon translation by Peter Dale suggests the English poet's recent translation of Dante might be more to his taste. As a translator himself, to judge from his more than forty cracks at it, there can be no doubt that Hofstadter is a fitting "claimant", not just to the heart but the very "marrow" of "Ma mignonne".

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This is a shaggy dog of a book, but as a celebration of the complexities of language and translation, it is one of the very few in over twenty years to give George Steiner's After Babel a run for its money. If finally it falls short of Steiner's tome, its "delightful dextrous daffiness" nevertheless deserves to be widely savoured.

David Wheatley is a poet and critic