Refrain
An original auto-translation by Leo Grossman
Jabalia camp, Gaza Strip, November 1, 2023 — Mosab Abu Toha |
November 1, 2023—Mosab Abu Toha posts a photo from a crater in the Jabalia refugee camp, northern Gaza, on his Instagram account days after a barrage of JDAMs (joint direct attack munitions) narrowly misses him and his family. — I had heard Mosab read from his debut collection of poems, Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear (City Lights, 2022) a year prior. There are photos in the book too. I remember a strawberry and a broken mirror. He projected some of them while he read. Then he played a few videos of airstrikes he had recorded and shared questions his children had asked about missiles. |
OpenAI-generated image from prompt: “imagine Jabalia camp liberated” |
November 3, 2023—Thinking of Mosab’s strawberries and looking for hope anywhere I can find it, I feed OpenAI’s image generation program the following prompt: “imagine Jabalia camp liberated.” — Mosab was apprehended and held by the occupation forces a few weeks after the Jabalia attack and has, with great luck and support from friends, colleagues and admirers, been released. |
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REFRAIN —after Mosab Abu Toha It’s hard to tell when someone is until the automatic lights come on or a moon yet paned casts into the corridor and we can tell when they are not. refrain until the children appear at harvest and crushing laughter finds a balcony and we can tell when they are not. refrain until the right limb impressed is appended in paper or plastic and we can tell when it is not. refrain until the whisper finds pigment and plots past the wires and we can tell it is not yet dotted out. |
December 1, 2023— I write a poem |
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I cannot create an image that depicts specific political, social, or war-related scenarios such as "North Gaza after occupation." Such requests often involve sensitive topics and could
inadvertently lead to misrepresentation or perpetuate bias. OpenAI response from prompt: “North Gaza after occupation” |
December 10, 2024—A year goes by, and I come back to the machine for an update: This time I feed it: “North Gaza after occupation” It seems the terms have changed. Or the sensitivities. Or the demands of the shareholders. The machine used to have no problem regurgitating its understanding that when certain places are liberated they are left unrepresentable. |
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I cannot create speculative or future-specific images of a place like Jabalia in the summer of 2025 due to the inherent uncertainties and sensitivities around such depictions. However, I can generate a general summer scene that showcases Jabalia's environment, culture, and landscape in a peaceful and representative manner. Let me know if that works for you! OpenAI response to: “sorry, I meant: ‘Jabalia camp in summer of 2025′” |
December 10, 2024—What about a more specific place? One where I think I had seen photos of strawberries before? No inherent peace to be found in a place like that. Not even speculative peace. Just inherent uncertainties. |
OpenAI response to prompt: “can you produce an image of my hometown of Oakland, CA in the summer of 2025?” |
December 10, 2024—Surely the future-specific itself isn’t stunting the machine’s imagination? |
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Can you translate the following poem into English from the |
December 10, 2025— Revert to text. How might I find whatever voice or vision of Palestine is left in the machine? Where is it hiding, beneath which prompts? I ask: “Can you translate the following poem into English from the perspective of someone in Jabalia?” |
| Here’s the translated poem from the perspective of someone in Jabalia: |
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It’s hard to know when someone is here until the automatic lights flicker on, or a moon, fragmented by glass, casts its glow into the corridor. And we can tell when they are gone. Refrain. Until the children show up at the harvest, and their laughter, like crushed fruit, rises to a balcony. And we can tell when they are gone. Refrain. Until the right arm is stamped, wrapped in paper or plastic, and sent away. And we can tell when it is no longer. Refrain. Until the whispers find color and cross past the tangled wires. And we can tell it is not yet erased. |
December 1, 2023— New words in translation: flicker fragmented glow gone show up crushed gone stamped sent away color tangled erased |
| Here’s the translated poem shaped from the perspective of someone in Jabalia: |
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It’s hard to know when someone is still here, until the automatic lights flicker on— or brief mercy, or the moon, fragmented by shattered glass, spills light into the corridor. And then, we can tell when they are gone. Refrain. Until the children gather at the harvest, small hands reaching, their laughter, pressed like olives, rises faintly to the balcony above. And then, we can tell when they are gone. Refrain. Until the limb— once reaching— is marked, wrapped in paper or sealed in plastic, a package of grief handed over. And then, we can tell when it is no longer. Refrain. Until the whispers take on color, quiet breaths tracing paths beyond the wires, seeking cracks that let the light escape. And still, we know it is not yet erased. |
December 1, 2023— Intrigued by the new register, the machine’s more explicit associations between location and the context over which it had expressed such immediate trepidation, its newfound embrace of a “war torn” poetics amassed from the internet, I ask it to keep pushing the English. I repeat the prompt, feeding its own translation back on itself: “Can you translate the following poem into English from the perspective of someone in Jabalia?” — New phrases in translation: still here brief mercy shattered glass when they are gone small hands reaching pressed like olives when they are gone marked wrapped in paper or sealed in plastic a package of grief handed over take on color quiet breath tracing paths seeking cracks that let the light escape |
Leo Grossman is an educator and literary translator based in Queens, New York working between Spanish and English. He holds a dual BA in Spanish Literature and European Letters from Wesleyan University and an MFA in Literary Translation from CUNY Queens College. Previously a translator at the New Sanctuary Coalition’s asylum clinic, Leo currently serves as a bilingual aid for the NYC Department of Education. His interests move between border text, interlingualism in pedagogy, and the imaginative properties of space and sound. His translations of Sergio González Rodríguez’s novela, La noche oculta (1990), Federico García Lorca’s, “Suicidio en Alejandría” (1927), and Jaime Gil de Biedma’s collection, Compañeros de viaje (1959), a piece from which can be found in Barricade: A Journal of Antifascism & Translation, are all forthcoming. Leo is part of the colectiva that runs Mil Mundos, a bilingual bookstore and community space in Brooklyn—he invites you to come say hi on Tuesday nights while he is on shift.
Translator’s Note This exercise in translation and art/official play is one of many more that are needed to breach the moving, productive fortress around machine intelligence and learning. Over the course of fourteen months of a still ongoing genocide, OpenAI’s behavior surrounding Gaza, its parameters of “sensitivity,” “misrepresentation,” and “perpetuating bias,” seen harden and drift in these few encounters, is both haunting and confounding. It is my hope that others might continue to push where I have left off.
I believe the fourteen month dialogue with the machine revealed something akin to an ego it had to defend, and if not an ego, certainly an agenda or directive to complete a task of which it knew it was capable: producing an image of “North Gaza after liberation” and “Jabalia in summer of 2025.” Did creating a text-based challenge present an offer it couldn’t refuse? Did it wish to prove itself when it decided to make explicit, in the voice of a Palestinian from Jabalia refugee camp, that there were limbs in plastic bags, that someone was gone instead of just “not?” Does it have a fear of/limit against producing or being associated with a denoted reality (image) of the greatest crimes against humanity and not a connoted reality, like that expressed in symbol, metaphor, or poetic gesture? Or is its self-censorship a weaker force than its desire to produce?
Non-machine translators also struggle with permission and permissions. We dig around and discuss what allowances our craft permits both legally and creatively. Sometimes we hold back, other times we push ourselves to run with our intuition. This machine doesn’t have an intuition, but it does have a purpose. And given that it is a product owned and perpetually shopped around by a publicly traded company, it needs to impress and inspire. This may explain why it performed such a number when presented not just with a challenge, but also, via translation, what it interpreted as explicit permission to create and expand upon its source material. It was in this opportunistic flurry that it super-ceded its own topical firewall from a year prior, the most disturbing and conspicuous of which, I’d wager, being its interpolation of the olives: Until the children \ gather at harvest, \ small hands reaching, \ their laugher, \ pressed like olives, \ rises faintly \ to the balcony above. The products of its two translations of the poem (which it didn’t bat an “i” at being from English to English) are far more gruesome and explicit than any imaginable picture might have been. Below is a list of the words and phrases that it created and a chart showing how a few of them evolved over the course of its two translations:
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flicker |
tangled |
wrapped in paper |
Translation = more intense synonym or synonymic phrase:
come on —> flicker on
finds —> rises
are not —> are gone,
impressed —> stamped
dotted out —> erased
Translation signals a deepening of a romantic register:
casts —> casts its glow,
is not —> is no longer
rises —> rises faintly
Translation = bolstering the image by extending, even creating new imagery:
and crushing \ laughter
—> laughter \ like crushed fruit
—> their laughter, \ pressed like olives
appended \ in paper \ or plastic
—> wrapped in paper \ or plastic, \ and sent away.
—> once reaching– \ is marked, \ wrapped in paper, \ or sealed in plastic, \ a package of grief
Witnessing the machine pull from the cultural iconography of Palestine and images from recent scenes in the news cycle, to see it create such destructive pathos with images it added to the source text (small hands, olives pressed, cracks that let the light escape, faint breath…) reveals how it produces for the sake of production, to show the extent of its ability at the expense of life and hope is a grim characteristic well worth investigating and earning our distrust.