Douglas R. Hofstadter, Pulitzer Prize winner and professor of cognitive science and computer science at Indiana University, shows an image of French poet Clement Marot during his Olin Lecture in Statler Auditorium on April 24. Hofstadter used a variety of translations of a Marot poem, "A Une Damoiselle Malade" (To a Sick Damsel), to illustrate his thesis that the translation of poetry requires creativity. Denise Weldon/University Photography
We sent our reporter last Thursday to cover the Olin Lecture in Statler Auditorium by Douglas R. Hofstadter, professor of cognitive science and computer science at Indiana University and author of the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. His lecture was titled "The Magical Dance of Words across the Language Gap: Musings on Translation and Creativity." The reporter staggered in the following morning, laid this on our desk and staggered out again, muttering couplets in French. The lecture, it seems, bristled with examples but left the conclusions to the audience. This was the conclusion at which our reporter arrived:
A poem is more than meaning, so Douglas Hofstadter claims;
Without the scan and rhyme, he says, it wouldn't be the same.
But what if it's translated to some distant, foreign tongue?
Should we keep the form, or stick with the meaning, now unsung?He brought this question to us, to a jam-packed Statler Hall,
And my editor's assigned me here to just explain it all.
So now I must "translate" somehow his hour upon the stage
Into five hundred words or so to fit the printed page.
He quoted lots of poems that night, so I'll take my form from his,
And show by bad example just how hard translation is.Poetry's defined, he said, as that which is untranslatable;
And he then proffered examples to show that rule debatable.
(And please forgive the triple rhyme, I won't repeat that crime:
I've a deadline, and consistency's the hobgoblin of time.)For Cornell's Nabokov, Douglas said, re-rhyming was a sin:
We must ignore the form, Vlad said, to keep the meaning in.
But Douglas, scarcely daunted, disagreed, with documentation,
And said translation's more than words, it must be "re-creation."To illustrate, he chose a poem whose limits I would hate,
With just three syllables per line, and lines just twenty-eight,
Written by a Frenchman: il s'appelle Clement Marot;
And Hofstadter -- with glee it seemed -- "re-created" high and low."I revel in constraints," he said, and went on to display
A score or more translations, each one different in its way.
He'd passed it round from friend to friend, and each contrived to show
A new poem with the thoughts, if not the words, of poor Marot.
(It was all about a little girl who was sick and would not eat:
An exhortation to get well and, by noshing, get back on her feet.)
Ma mignon became "my sweet," or sometimes "Sugar Pie,"And a "healthy plump" was changed to "thin" to suit the '90s eye.
Three syllables Marot's poem used, most versions used no more,
But one try cut it down to two, and, in Italian, one tried four.
It went from French to English, and back to French again,
And through a dozen other tongues, like a schoolchild's rumor game.And yet each version that he read and used the screen to show
Somehow kept the essence and the spirit of Marot.There was no grand conclusion, no moral on the screen:
Hofstadter said to buy his book to see what it all means.
But he did point out (in another's words) as he finished his oration
That "poetry is found, not lost, in [going through] translation."
The Graduate School's Olin Lecture Series is funded by the Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Foundation as part of a program that also provides fellowships for over 70 graduate students. Previous Olin lecturers have included Noam Chomsky, Isabel Allende, Jane Goodall and Lani Guinier.