Bring on the beta

Perhaps you've already heard about Google Translate's epic Jabberwocky fail. If not, the Google Empire has developed a translator specifically for poetry, and while Harriet loves a pie-in-the-sky idea, it doesn't take a botched French translation of the "Jabberwocky" to tell us the machine-poet isn't going exactly as planned. If Google Translate is going to take a nose dive, then why not see it as a "fascinating failure?" suggests Sam Leith in the Guardian.

For in some ways, making a formal poem has a sort of crossword-puzzle quality. Let's say the job of the poet is to turn an idea into a sentence, or a number of sentences. The poet is then looking at the ways those sentences are joined, grammatically and lexically; how rearrangements and substitutions would affect the sense, and how they would work with and against the scheme of the verse.

In theory, the translator might work with predictable poems, but dealing with gyre and gimble irregularity might cause a few hang-ups:

Take this couplet from Andrew Marvell's poem The Garden:

Annihilating all that's made

To a green Thought in a green Shade.

The poem's in iambic tetrameter: di-dum, di-dum, di-dum, di-dum etc. But in the last line, the only way "green thought" and "green shade" can sensibly be spoken is as spondees – that is, two stressed syllables in a row. Spondees are common enough, but it's pretty unusual to find a couple of them bunging up a four-foot iambic line: they call the thing to a standstill, which is what's intended. We can't expect Google to see the point of that line, still less turn it into French – but then, I doubt there's a human translator who could make that work.