On Monday, Nov. 17, novelist Hamid Ismailov and translator Shelley Fairweather-Vega visited Swarthmore to discuss their recent collaborative work, “We Computers.” The novel, authored by Ismailov and translated by Fairweather-Vega, was recently announced as a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award for Translated Literature.
After a brief introduction from Susan W. Lippincott Professor of Modern and Classical Languages Sibelan Forrester, Ismailov read aloud from the novel’s original Uzbek text. Fairweather-Vega followed with an English translation.
The passage recounted a dream in which Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam visits the novel’s protagonist (a fictionalized Ismailov by the name of Abdulhamid Ismail, or “A.I.”) and advises him to read the work of a long-dead Turkish writer named Nedîm. The following day, A.I. learns of an actual historical figure who fits Mandelstam’s description of Nedîm exactly. This poet’s exploration of the ‘ghazal’ form soon becomes a central source of inspiration for A.I.’s own work.
Ismailov explained that A.I.’s mystical experience with Nedîm was an essentially accurate retelling of his own discovery of the Turkish poet. For what would be the first of many occasions over the course of the evening, Ismailov seemed to be intentionally ambiguous with regard to questions of the supernatural. The author would later speak of his desire to dissolve the boundaries separating poetry from prose in his written work; in a similar fashion, the anecdotes he shared throughout the event often blurred the line between the literal and metaphorical, the mystical and the mundane.
“For me,” he said in response to a question about the possibility of artificial intelligence replacing human authors, “AI is the ultimate representation of linear, rational thinking. Any of you who are studying psychology here know that our faculties are much wider. Apart from linear thinking, we’ve got intuition. We’ve got a mystical side. I can’t explain this particular dream — where it came from, or why I was told the name of a man who became one of my beloved poets. It happens quite often. Many of my pen names come from people I meet in dreams. So there is something more rich than rational thinking.”
Ismailov’s appreciation for the unique capacities of human consciousness complements an equally sincere belief in the creative potential of artificial intelligence. His interest in AI far predates the recent surge in the popularity of large language models. “We Computers” is based on his years of collaboration with French academic and writer Jean-Pierre Balpe, a pioneer of computer-generated literature. Jon-Perse, the novel’s other protagonist, engages with the fictionalized Ismailov in retellings of the two authors’ longstanding debates about the nature of authorship.
“[Balpe’s] view is that poetry has nothing to do with human beings. It’s just a collection of words, and every reader brings his feelings into it by default. Nothing matters, not the biography of the poet or why he wrote this particular poem. And many poets do agree with that. I disagree, and with this book I had the chance to go deeply into his mode of thinking. We’ve got a very playful, creative relationship. I fictionalized our lives, but I left the theoretical premises.”
Ismailov himself is intensely interested in the biographies of writers and philosophers. A partially fabricated account of the life of Persian ghazal poet Hafez is interwoven with the story of A.I. and Jon-Perse. As Ismailov described this aspect of the novel, Fairweather-Vega added that the Hafez sections made for particularly challenging translations due to the degree of vulgar slang that they contain. Ismailov laughed and explained that this crudeness was intentional:
“The dirty jokes are not there for their own sake. They are there to show that Hafez and others were living normal lives, not restricted by ideologies or religious views. It was a flamboyant life — a joyful life. The jokes show the reality of the time, and the community of writers. They’re making fun of each other, which you might not expect from a lofty intellectual community.”
The importance of play, among people, among languages, and among genres, is a central theme of Ismailov’s work. “We Computers” is the first ghazal-novel, synthesizing the poetic and prosaic and integrating linguistic traces of the various cultures that contributed to the development of the ghazal form.
“As a prose writer, I’m trying to blend the borders between different narrative styles. For me, human thought is not divided between, for example, academic thinking and fictional thinking. They can happen in your head simultaneously, and I’m trying to reflect that in my prose. The novel as a genre is always developing, becoming more complicated. Dostoevsky said that he wanted to write the polyphonic novel — a novel using many voices. I want to write a polytextual novel.”
Ismailov considers the ghazal a uniquely perfect model for this polytextuality.
“The ghazal is a love song which was created in the Arabic poetry of the seventh century, but then came to the Persian world and to the Turkic world and developed there. In both Persian and Turkic languages there is no gender [unlike in Arabic], so when you write the ghazal, you don’t know who the beloved is. It could be a him, a her, an absolute God, or anything else. There is a level of ambiguity.”
Ismailov went on to highlight that the ghazal’s popularity in literary traditions beyond the one from which it originates imbues the form with a sense of fundamental dislocation. Turkic and Persian ghazal poets understand that they don’t exist in a common linguistic or cultural space with the ghazal’s original pioneers; their longing to overcome this divide without sacrificing their native languages is palpable in the texts they create.
For Ismailov, the power of human language derives not from its clarity, but from its ambiguity. Our language, he says, needs not and should not be transparent, rational, or stable in its semantic content. Long before the rise of artificial intelligence, ghazal poets like Nedîm and Hafez used literature as a means of expressing and engaging with the incomprehensible facets of human experience; this approach has evolved as it has passed through dialects, cultures, and centuries.
The age of AI doesn’t pose a threat to the poetic tradition. It provides a thrilling opportunity.
“Literature does not exist in time. It is language that takes us beyond specific time and place.”
