Artificial intelligence appears to be taking humanity one step closer toward that goal.<\/p>\n
AI-powered tools are already being widely used by lawyers to translate legal documents<\/a> from one language to the next. The mass market romance publisher Harlequin has turned to AI to translate its novels<\/a> for international audiences. And hospitals are deploying AI translation<\/a> to communicate directly with patients in multiple languages.<\/p>\n The speed and skill with which these AI-powered translation tools operate are certainly impressive.<\/p>\n But there is an important frontier for translation technology, one that it might never be able to breach: the poem. <\/p>\n That\u2019s because translating poetry, thus far, has been a uniquely human experience. It demands intimate knowledge of two languages, which large language models certainly possess. But it also requires a mastery of different cultures and perspectives, what literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak<\/a> calls a \u201cworlding\u201d of language and culture<\/a>. <\/p>\n Pushing the limits of language<\/p>\n When scholars have studied the creativity of chatbots by prompting them to produce poetry, they\u2019ve noticed that the poems tend to be more homogeneous and standardized<\/a> than those written by humans.<\/p>\n Chatbots\u2019 poetry translations have similar issues. <\/p>\n AI seems to struggle in three main areas: rendering metaphor, decoding complex sentence structure and creatively conveying mood or emotion.<\/p>\n To demonstrate these flaws, I worked closely with Adeeba Shahid Talukder<\/a>, an award-winning poet and translator, to write this piece and to translate the 1953 poem \u201cMul\u0101q\u0101t,\u201d or \u201cMeeting,\u201d composed by one of the most famous Urdu poets of the 20th century, Faiz Ahmed Faiz<\/a>.<\/p>\n Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Faiz was born in 1911 in Sialkot, in pre-Partition India. In 1947, when that area in the Punjab became part of present-day Pakistan, Faiz became a citizen of the newly founded country, though his relationship with it was marked by both hope and disillusionment. He lived in different parts of the world for long stretches of time, but he returned to Pakistan toward the end of his life. He died there in 1984. <\/p>\n His poetry is celebrated for its marriage of classical tropes like the ache of unfulfilled longing for the beloved \u2014 and the lover\u2019s willingness to be consumed or destroyed in his pursuit of her \u2014 with the political struggles of his time, like the plight of working people and the dream of a Marxist revolution. His poetry is notoriously difficult to translate because of its highly ornate, extended metaphors, which have few easy equivalents in English. This forces the translator \u2013 be it human or machine \u2013 to push the limits of language. <\/p>\n From 1951 to 1955, Faiz was imprisoned<\/a> on allegations of sedition against the Pakistani state. His first three months were spent in solitary confinement. <\/p>\n From Faiz\u2019s letters, scholars learned that despite the isolation of his imprisonment, he felt as if the experience made him more attuned to his senses, as if he were \u201cfalling in love again for the first time<\/a>.\u201d His time in jail was also among his most prolific as a poet, with \u201cMeeting\u201d composed during his sentence. <\/p>\n Here\u2019s our translation of the opening verses of \u201cMeeting\u201d:<\/p>\n This night is the dark, greater, for caravans in its shadow, a thousand moons This night is the dark, but from the tree of this very night grown entangled has rained drops of silence When prompted to provide a \u201clyrical translation into English,\u201d ChatGPT produced the following:<\/p>\n This night is a tree of pain, Its branches bear Yet from this very tree, From its dew in quiet, Chatbots fail at translation\u2019s most basic task<\/p>\n When Faiz composed \u201cMeeting,\u201d he had been separated from his wife and two daughters for two years. He was keenly aware of missing parts of their childhoods that would never return.<\/p>\n This biographical information can help translators understand the poem\u2019s exploration of \u201cva\u1e63l<\/a>,\u201d or the meeting of lover and beloved. A common trope in classical Urdu poetry, it usually captures the joy and exultation of the lovers\u2019 union. <\/p>\n But in Faiz\u2019s poem, the union with the beloved also contains an acute awareness of mortality and the transience of beauty \u2013 a recognition of what has been lost, and the suffering still to come.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why we rendered the opening lines of \u201cMeeting\u201d as \u201cThis night is the dark,\/lush tree of a grief greater\/than you and I.\u201d <\/p>\n ChatGPT\u2019s translation is more literal: \u201cThis night is the tree of pain.\u201d <\/p>\n While there is nothing technically wrong with this translation<\/a>, the chatbot\u2019s version doesn\u2019t capture the nuances of the tree metaphor and the way its dense, expansive branches can encompass the complexity and beauty of the emotions evoked by the night of the lovers\u2019 union.<\/p>\n AI also fails to grasp the poem\u2019s intricate sentence structure. ChatGPT has translated \u201cin its shadow a thousand moons \/ have wept away all their light\u201d as a nonsensical construction: \u201cWithin a thousand moons\u2019 shadows, \/ And all my light has wept itself away.\u201d <\/p>\n This error appears to have happened because the chatbot translated \u201capn\u0101\u201d \u2013 a reflexive possessive pronoun in Urdu \u2013 as \u201cmy,\u201d inaccurately parsing it as referring to the speaker instead of the moons.<\/p>\n Finally, and most importantly, AI models lack the ability to express emotion the way a human can<\/a>. A machine with no bodily experience of being human cannot meaningfully perceive a poem so enmeshed in human experience. Its engagement is merely superficial.<\/p>\n In its attempt to convey the mood of the original piece, ChatGPT offers: \u201cFrom its dew in quiet, \/ A few drops rest upon your brow, \/ And glitter like tiny diamonds.\u201d <\/p>\n It\u2019s clear that ChatGPT is struggling to decode the grammatical structure of the poem and is trying to make the text lyrical enough to convey the awe and wonder of the original. But the model\u2019s contrivances toward the lyrical \u2013 for example, describing diamonds as \u201ctiny\u201d or \u201cglittering\u201d \u2013 have no relation to the original poem. <\/p>\n \u201cFrom its dew in quiet\u201d is an incoherent clause. The phrase that seems to have thrown the model off is \u201cis\u012b k\u012b shabnam se kh\u0101mosh\u012b ke yeh cand qa\u1e6dre,\u201d or \u201cits dew \/ has rained drops of silence.\u201d<\/p>\n Urdu literary critic Shamsur Rahman Faruqi<\/a> has explained how Urdu poets \u201ctreat metaphor as fact and then go on to create further metaphors from that fact<\/a>.\u201d In \u201cMeeting,\u201d the metaphor of the night of the reunion as a tree becomes a fact, which allows for the flowering of a new metaphor \u2013 that of the dew on its leaves as drops of silence that fall on the lover and their beloved. These silences, heavy with sorrow, then adorn the beloved like precious jewels, conveying the idea that only a profound grief can beget such beauty. <\/p>\n The model has failed at conjuring this sense of wonder because it cannot parse the poem in accordance with the literary conventions of Urdu poetry.<\/p>\n ChatGPT prefaced its translated text by assuring us that it had \u201ccrafted a lyrical, poetic English version of Faiz\u2019s \u2018Mul\u0101q\u0101t,\u2019 keeping the imagery, rhythm, and emotional flow intact so it reads like a poem rather than a literal translation.\u201d <\/p>\n Yet as we have shown, its translation fails to accomplish the most basic task of literary translation: to convey the heart of the original.<\/p>\n Chatbots, in other words, are a poor substitute for the literary translator, and they bolster the assertion of the late Indian poet, scholar and translator A.K. Ramanujan<\/a> that \u201conly poems can translate poems<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Adeeba Shahid Talukder helped with the research and writing of this article, in addition to the translation of Faiz\u2019s poem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For centuries, people have dreamed of undoing Babel. Sci-fi novelists envisioned universal translators, and linguists devised international languages,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":759608,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[64,63,105],"class_list":["post-759607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=759607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759607\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/759608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=759607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=759607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=759607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Black-and-white](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/file-20260622-71-sh305m.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Wikimedia Commons<\/a>, CC BY-SA<\/a><\/p>\n
\n lush tree of a grief greater
\n than you and I\u2014<\/p>\n
\n of torch-bearing stars
\n have lost themselves
\n in the siege of its branches;<\/p>\n
\n have wept away all their light.<\/p>\n
\n lush tree of a grief greater
\n than you and I\u2014<\/p>\n
\n the amber leaves
\n of these moments
\n have fallen, <\/p>\n
\n in your locks and flowered
\n as the fires of pomegranate
\n blossoms; its dew <\/p>\n
\n upon your brow,
\n bedecked it with a silver
\n string of pearls.<\/p>\n
\n Vaster than you, vaster than me.<\/p>\n
\n Thousands of torches in place of stars,
\n Caravans lost
\n Within a thousand moons\u2019 shadows,
\n And all my light has wept itself away.<\/p>\n
\n A few golden leaves of fleeting moments
\n Fall into your hair,
\n Entwined, they bloom like roses.<\/p>\n
\n A few drops rest upon your brow,
\n And glitter like tiny diamonds.<\/p>\n