Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet who also worked as an essayist, art critic and translator. His poems are described as exhibiting mastery of rhyme and rhythm, containing an exoticism inherited from the Romantics, and are based on observations of real life.
Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American cognitive and computer scientist whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, analogy-making, strange loops, artificial intelligence, and discovery in mathematics and physics. His 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, and a National Book Award for Science. His 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology.
"Jabberwocky" is a nonsense poem written by Lewis Carroll about the killing of a creature named "the Jabberwock". It was included in his 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass, the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). The book tells of Alice's adventures within the back-to-front world of the Looking-Glass world.
Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, also known as GEB, is a 1979 book by Douglas Hofstadter.
Clément Marot was a French Renaissance poet.
Maurice Scève was a French poet active in Lyon during the Renaissance period. He was the centre of the Lyonnese côterie that elaborated the theory of spiritual love, derived partly from Plato and partly from Petrarch. This spiritual love, which animated Antoine Héroet's Parfaicte Amye (1543) as well, owed much to Marsilio Ficino, the Florentine translator and commentator of Plato's works.
Metamagical Themas is an eclectic collection of articles that Douglas Hofstadter wrote for the popular science magazine Scientific American during the early 1980s. The anthology was published in 1985 by Basic Books.
Gadsby is a 1939 novel by Ernest Vincent Wright, written without words that contain the letter E, the most common letter in English. A work that deliberately avoids certain letters is known as a lipogram. The plot revolves around the dying fictional city of Branton Hills, which is revitalized as a result of the efforts of protagonist John Gadsby and a youth organizer.
Anne Hébert, was a Canadian author and poet. She won Canada's top literary honor, the Governor General's Award, three times, twice for fiction and once for poetry.
"The Wife's Lament" or "The Wife's Complaint" is an Old English poem of 53 lines found on folio 115 of the Exeter Book and generally treated as an elegy in the manner of the German frauenlied, or "women's song". The poem has been relatively well preserved and requires few if any emendations to enable an initial reading. Thematically, the poem is primarily concerned with the evocation of the grief of the female speaker and with the representation of her state of despair. The tribulations she suffers leading to her state of lamentation, however, are cryptically described and have been subject to many interpretations. Indeed, Professor Stephen Ramsay has said, "the 'correct' interpretation of "The Wife's Lament" is one of the more hotly debated subjects in medieval studies."
Untranslatability is the property of text or speech for which no equivalent can be found when translated into another (given) language. A text that is considered to be untranslatable is considered a lacuna, or lexical gap. The term arises when describing the difficulty of achieving the so-called perfect translation. It is based on the notion that there are certain concepts and words that are so interrelated that an accurate translation becomes an impossible task. Some writers have suggested that language carries sacred notions or is intrinsic to national identity. Brian James Baer posits that untranslatability is sometimes seen by nations as proof of the national genius. He quotes Alexandra Jaffe: "When translators talk about untranslatable, they often reinforce the notion that each language has its own 'genius', an 'essence' that naturally sets it apart from all other languages and reflects something of the 'soul' of its culture or people".
A Bongard problem is a kind of puzzle invented by the Soviet computer scientist Mikhail Moiseevich Bongard, probably in the mid-1960s. They were published in his 1967 book on pattern recognition. The objective is to spot the differences between the two sides. Bongard, in the introduction of the book credits the ideas in it to a group including M. N. Vaintsvaig, V. V. Maksimov, and M. S. Smirnov.
David Shulman was an American lexicographer and cryptographer.
Egbert B. Gebstadter is a fictional author who appears in the indices of books by Douglas R. Hofstadter. For each Hofstadter book, there is a corresponding Gebstadter book. His name is derived from "GEB", the abbreviation for Hofstadter's first book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid; the letters appear in his last name, permuted in his first name, and permuted again in his initials.
"Uncleftish Beholding" (1989) is a short text by Poul Anderson, included in his anthology "All One Universe". It is designed to illustrate what English might look like without its large number of words derived from languages such as French, Greek, and Latin, especially with regard to the proportion of scientific words with origins in those languages.
Pierre Reverdy was a French poet whose works were inspired by and subsequently proceeded to influence the provocative art movements of the day, Surrealism, Dadaism and Cubism. The loneliness and spiritual apprehension that ran through his poetry appealed to the Surrealist credo. He, though, remained independent of the prevailing "-isms", searching for something beyond their definitions. His writing matured into a mystical mission seeking, as he wrote: "the sublime simplicity of reality."
Francis Jammes was a French and European poet. He spent most of his life in his native region of Béarn and the Basque Country and his poems are known for their lyricism and for singing the pleasures of a humble country life. His later poetry remained lyrical, but also included a strong religious element brought on by his (re)conversion to Catholicism in 1905.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Jehan Chardavoine was a French Renaissance composer mostly active in Paris. He was one of the first known editors of popular chansons, and the author, according to musicologist Julien Tiersot, of "the only volume of monodic songs from the 16th century that has survived to our days."
Neologisms constitute a notable part of the writing style of Stanisław Lem, a Polish science fiction author and essayist.
