Douglas R. Hofstadter, Pulitzer Prize
winner and professor of cognitive science and computer science at Indiana
University, shows ... French poet Clement Marot during his Olin Lecture in
Statler Auditorium on April 24...
By Bill Steele
We
sent our reporter last Thursday to cover the Olin Lecture[ ] The reporter
staggered in the following morning... muttering couplets in French[ ] 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?
...
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;
...
But he did point out (in another's words) as
he finished his oration
That "poetry is found, not lost, in [going through]
translation."