Le Ton Beau De Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language

This is a superb read from cover to cover. My thanks to Douglas Hofstadter for making my summer holiday a delight as I immersed myself in this enjoyable and stimulating work. He deals with the enormous issues of translation in a way which is amusing, intellectually challenging, thought-provoking, imaginative, refreshing, enlightening and exhaustive. I am not a linguist, but this stuff is just fascinating.

Okay, I'm a Hofstadter fan, but this is a really amazing book. Starting from a simple poem, Hofstadter wheels out onto a wild journey through the issues of translation, poetry, language, intelligence, and, ultimately, what it means to be a person. This being Hofstadter, wordplay is in evidence throughout, of course, but unlike his other books, this is deeply personal, because much of it focuses on Hofstadter's recent loss of his wife and the feelings that it inspired. You have never read a book like it, I promise