intrinsically untranslatable; what it means to translate nonsense passages
from one language to another; the absurdity of supposing that today's
mostly money-driven machine-translation gimmickry could handle even the
simplest of poetry; and on and on.
The two middle chapters of Le Ton beau de Marot are devoted to a work
of fiction that I had recently fallen in love with: Alexander Pushkin's novel
in verse, Eugene Onegin. I first came into contact with this work through a
couple of English translations, and then read others, always fascinated by
the translators' different philosophies and styles. From this first flame of
excitement, I slowly was drawn into trying to read the original text, and then
somehow, despite having a poor command of Russian, I could not prevent
myself from trying to translate a stanza or two. Thus started a slippery slope
that I soon slid down, eventually stunning myself by devoting a whole year to
recreating the entire novel - nearly 400 sparkling sonnets - in English
verse. Of course, during that time, my Russian improved by leaps and
bounds, though it still is far from conversationally fluent. As I write, my
Onegin has not yet come out, but it will be appearing at just about the same
time in 1999 as the book you are holding - the twentieth-anniversary
version of Codel, Escher, Bach. And the year 1999 plays an equally important
role in my EO's creation, being the 200th birthyear of Alexander Pushkin.
Forward-looking and Backward-looking BooksLe Ton beau de Marot is a bit longer than GEB, and on its first page, I go out
on a limb and call it "probably the best book I will ever write". Some of my
readers will maintain that GEB is superior, and I can see why they might do
so. But it's so long since I wrote GEB that perhaps the magical feeling I had
when writing it has faded, while the magic of LeTbM is still vivid. Still,
there's no denying that, at least in the short run, LeTbM has had far less
impact than GEB did, and I confess that that's disappointed me quite a bit.
Permit me to speculate for a moment as to why this might be the case.
In some sense, GEB was a "forward-looking" book, or at least on its surface it
gave that appearance. Many hailed it as something like "the bible of
artificial intelligence", which is of course ridiculous, but the fact is that many
young students read it and caught the bug of my own fascination with the
modeling of mind in all of its elusive aspects, including the evanescent goals
of "I" and free will and consciousness. Although I am the furthest thing in
the world from being a futurist, a science-fiction addict, or a technology
guru, I was often pigeonholed in just that way, simply because I had written
a long treatise that dealt quite a bit with computers and their vast potential
(in the most philosophical of senses), and because my book was quite a hit
among young people interested in computers.
Well, by contrast, Le Ton beau de Marot might be seen as a "backward-
looking" book, not so much because it was inspired by a sixteenth-century
poem and deals with many other authors of the past, such as Dante and
Pushkin, but because there simply is nothing in the book's pages that could
Twentieth-anniversary Preface P-21