Love in the Time of AI: What Translation, Poetry, and Artificial Intelligence Teach Us About Human Connection Today
As artificial intelligence reshapes how language is written, translated, and consumed, questions about authorship, meaning, and human creativity feel newly urgent. Last fall, author Hamid Ismailov and translator Shelley Fairweather-Vega joined Yale faculty members Samuel Hodgkin and Claire Roosien for a discussion regarding Ismailov’s new book, We Computers: A Ghazal Novel, which imagines artificial intelligence not as a replacement for human expression, but as a mirror reflecting centuries of linguistic exchange, longing, and collaboration across cultures.
Set in the late 1980’s, the novel follows French poet and psychologist Jon-Perse, who builds a computer program for analyzing and generating literature. His early experiments are driven by snippets of Persian poetry taught to him by his Uzbek translation partner, Abdulhamid Ismail. Together, he and his machine collaborate to explore deeper worlds of history, philosophy, and love.
Ismailov’s background as a poet, translator, and student of Eastern and Western literature aided him in blending work across centuries and contents. The book is an ode to poetry as a transnational medium for love and longing in the digital age. Ismailov described the work as partially self-referential, noting the close resemblance between his own name and that of the character Abdulhamid Ismail.
Jon-Perse’s dynamic with Abdulhamid Ismail mirrors Ismailov’s real-life working relationship with Fairweather-Vega, who has translated three of his books. She described the book as having “a sense of humor” and said it was “so much fun to work on."
The work “became the same story in a different medium,” Fairweather-Vega said. To “maintain the mystery” and remind the reader of the book’s origins, she chose to retain some Persian and Uzbek words. She also described challenges of converting gender-neutral pronouns into English and translating intimate scenes without losing emotional precision. In discussing Jon-Perse and Ismail’s debates about translation, the speakers drew from their varied knowledge bases in literature, language and regional studies. Sam Hodgkin and Claire Roosien’s backgrounds allowed for deep exploration of the book’s transnational elements. Hodgkin is the Director of Undergraduate Studies of the Comparative Literature major at Yale, whose work focuses on medieval and modern Eurasia, and Roosien is the Director of Undergraduate Studies for Slavic Languages and Literature, and former Director of Graduate Studies of the European and Russian Studies Master’s program.
Roosien asked Ismailov to reflect on the role of artificial intelligence in the book and how it resonates with AI coverage in the news today.
“Language belongs to everyone, and it has space for everyone,” Ismailov said.
This event was co-sponsored by the Central Asia Initiative, the Yale Slavic and Eurasian Colloquium, and the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund. The fund supports Yale faculty in convening on-campus events that engage international themes in the humanities, social sciences, or related disciplines. More information about the application process and eligibility is available on the MacMillan website.