Refrain

An original auto-translation by Leo Grossman

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s the translated poem from the perspective of someone in Jabalia:

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

December 1, 2023— I write a poem

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

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.

 

 

 

December 10, 2024—Surely the
future-specific itself isn’t stunting
the machine’s imagination?

 

 

 

 

 

 

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?”

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.

 

Here’s the translated poem shaped from the perspective of someone in Jabalia:

December 10, 2024—

New words in translation:

flicker

fragmented

glow

gone

show up

crushed

gone

stamped

sent away

color

tangled

erased

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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:

flicker                                      tangled                                        wrapped in paper
fragmented                            erased                                        or sealed in plastic
glow                                        still here                                      a package of grief
gone                                       brief mercy                                once reaching
show up                                  shattered glass                           handed over
crushed                                 when they are gone                    take on color
gone                                       small hands reaching               quiet breath
stamped                                pressed like olives                    tracing paths
sent away                              when they are gone                     seeking cracks
color                                       marked                                       that let the light escape

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.