ChatGPoeTry: 杜甫 Du Fu (712-770) 春望 (Spring View)

This is it, boys. The big one. The freaking widowmaker of Chinese poetry. It's got patriotism. It's got isolation. It's chock full of allegory. Every line has multiple meanings. But everyone tries to interpret it because everyone knows it and, like debating Confucian texts, it's a mark of intelligence. 

And I'm a sucker for proving I'm smart.

Now I'm going to try and make it rhyme. With the help of a robot.

I've cribbed the poem and translation from this site because I love how they laid it out.

春望
Chūn Wàng
[spring] [view]
Spring View

國破山河在
guó pò shānhé zài
[nation] [broken] [mountain] [river] [exist]
The nation is broken, though mountains and rivers remain.

城春草木深
chéng chūn cǎomù shēn
[city] [spring] [grass] [tree] [deep]
In cities in the Spring, the grass and trees grow deeply.

感時花濺淚
gǎn shí huā jiàn lèi
[feel] [time] [flower] [splash] [tears]
Sensing the moment, flowers shed tears.

恨別鳥驚心
hèn bié niǎo jīng xīn
[hate] [separate] [bird] [startle] [heart]
Hating the separation, birds are fearful at heart.

烽火連三月
fēnghuǒ lián sān yuè
[beacon] [flame] [continously] [three] [month]
The beacons have burnt continuously for three months.

家書抵萬金
jiā shū dǐ wàn jīn
[home] [letter] [balance] [ten thousand] [gold]
A letter from home is worth ten-thousand pieces of gold.

白頭搔更短
bái tóu sāo gèng duǎn
[white] [hair] [scratch] [more] [lack]
My white hair is even scarcer from scratching.

渾欲不勝簪
hún yù bù shēng zān
[at all] [want] [not] [hold] [hairpin]
And can barely hold a hairpin. 

Me + ChatGPT

Here we go:

Nation in pieces. Mountains, rivers stay true.
City in spring. Grass and trees grow full.
Sensing the moment, flowers weep dew.
Hating their parting, startled birds call.

Lit beacon fires for three long months blaze.
A letter from home worth ten thousand gold.
White hair thinning with each scratch's graze,
Can barely keep a hairpin's hold.

Notes:

ChatGPT defaults to sonnet mode (line 1 rhymes with line 2, 3 rhymes with 4, and so on). I spammed the regenerate button and they all sucked. Then how about a quatrain (line 1 rhymes with 3, line 2 with 4, etc.)? It didn't seem to know how to write one so I had to trick it by feeding it rearranged lines two at a time.

One analogy that I like is the AI being 'sandwiched' between human input and human-edited output. Many sandwiches made very quickly.

But even that is a bit simplistic. The various inputs and outputs have been blended so much that I can't tell which bit is the AI and which bit is me. It's fair to say, though, that I would not have been able to produce it, or sustain the effort to produce it, without the AI on hand to bounce words off.

AI Art

As you might have guessed, the art is also done by Bing Images, another generative AI which became available in March 2023. I just want to say a few words about that.

Before we had writing, we communicated in pictures. And while we teach practically every kid how to read and write, only a few get trained to create images that our attention doesn't immediately dismiss as childish scrawls. So text-to-image generation could be a bigger deal than AI chat, especially in empowering people with the imagination and language, but not the skills or tools, to convey tone and emotion through compelling imagery.

The painting is a riff on Thomas Cole's Course of Empire but, I think, conveys the dissonance between nature's spring and the nation's destruction in ways that the poem can't.

I showed it to Mum (big mistake as always), and she was like, "WhY iS thErE A WHItE wOmAn In iT?" 

via GIPHY

If you have to explain the joke it's not funny anymore, but here goes:

If I'm going to rewrite a Chinese poem to be more palatable to English ears, then I should reimagine associated imagery to be more relatable to Western eyes. The collapsing oriental dynasty is a trope, a punchline. Good riddance to stagnant corruption. That's creative destruction, baby. Only post-Enlightenment Western civilization is allowed to escape cyclical history with linear, if not exponential, progress. Didn't you know?

Lose 'Western' lands, however - Macedonia, Rome, Constantinople, France's Third Republic - and everyone mourns the triumph of barbarism over civility, more so if the barbarians came from the East. So the image tries to link aesthetically Du Fu's fall of the Tang dynasty with the sacking of the Greco-Romanesque civilization in Cole's painting and the abrupt unexpected end to manifest destiny. Maybe the visual point I'm trying to make is something like:

"This could happen to you."

Other translations:

• Frank Hudson
• Paul Rouzer (Columbia University)