The article explores how artificial intelligence struggles with translating poetry due to its reliance on metaphor, complex sentence structures, and emotional depth.

Using the example of Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz's 1953 poem 'Mulāqāt,' it highlights how AI-generated translations lack the cultural and emotional nuance required to capture the essence of literary works.Human translators, like Adeeba Shahid Talukder, emphasize the need for a 'worlding' of language and culture, which AI models fail to achieve.The piece critiques chatbots like ChatGPT for producing homogenized, literal translations that miss the poetic intricacies of the original text.It argues that while AI can handle technical translations, the creative and emotional dimensions of poetry remain uniquely human.

The author, Krupa Shandilya, underscores the importance of human expertise in literary translation, reaffirming AK Ramanujan's assertion that 'only poems can translate poems.'