How long does it take to read Le Ton Beau de Marot?
In Praise of the Music of Language
Le Ton Beau de Marot by Douglas R. Hofstadter takes about 11 hours 35 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 11 hours 35 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 1997. 632 pages, about 173,800 words.
24 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 19 hours 19 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 11 hours 35 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 7 hours 15 minutes |
The page count is the median across 4 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Not Merely a set of translations of one poem, Le Ton beau de Marot is an autobiographical essay, a love letter to the French language, a series of musings on life, loss, and death, a sweet bouquet of stirring poetry - but most of all, it celebrates the limitless creativity fired by a passion for the music of words. Dozens of literary themes and creations are woven into the picture, including Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Dante's Inferno, Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, Villon's ballades, Nabokov's essays, Georges Perec's La disparition, Vikram Seth's Golden Gate. Horace's odes, and more. Rife with stunning form-content interplay, crammed with creative linguistic experiments yet always crystal-clear, this book is meant not only for lovers of literature, but also for people who wish to be brought into contact with current ideas about how creativity works, and who wish to see how today's computational models of language and thought stack up next to the human mind.
Subjects: Translating and interpreting, Übersetzung, Prosodie, Lied, Vertalen, Lyrik
