What is Reddit's opinion of Le Ton Beau De Marot: In Praise Of The Music Of Language?

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You might like Le Ton Beau De Marot: In Praise Of The Music Of Language which is an entire book revolving around the fuzziness of language and the difficulty of translation, due to how polymorphic language is. Too bad it's Hofstadter's worst received book.

Me, I liked Metamagical Themas. It's a handful of short snippets into fun playful topics. Not as deep as GEB, but more playful and easier to digest.

>translating directly will give me more of a french perspective instead of looking at the language trough an english lense, am I correct?

No. The best way to get "a French (mother-tongue speaker's) perspective" is through doing the French as it is, in the moment, directly, without any kind of translation or intermediation at all. No English lens, no Albanian lens, no Swahili or Mandarin lens -- it's just what it is. That's true for songs, poetry, novels, or day-to-day speech.

If you really want to get into issues of philosophy or linguistics about translation theory, instead of just figuring out how better to speak and grok French, then maybe you might want to check out Le Ton Beau De Marot: In Praise Of The Music Of Language by Douglas Hoftstadter.

Douglas Hofstadter treats this subject among related other subjects of the form "When is X really X?" in his books. I believe Le Ton Beau de Marot is the best one as far as the topic of death is concerned.

But basically, the atoms are irrelevant since they move through our bodies throughout our lives, and individual atoms don't have identities anyway. It makes more sense to ask whether or not the representations of us in people's minds, in recordings, etc. can be seen as an afterlife of sorts. And then, does Ben Franklin (about whom there exists much posthumous recollection) have more of an afterlife than some other random person of his time?

I am not sure whether I agree or disagree with you, but I think that you might find the following book interesting:

http://www.amazon.com/Le-Ton-Beau-De-Marot/dp/0465086454

Agreed. along with a many other considerations. Lots about that aspect of lyrical translation in this book. http://www.amazon.com/Ton-Beau-Marot-Praise-Language/dp/0465086454/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268618003&sr=1-1