Something strange happened
I’ve been working on a process to translate poems by Jorge Luis Borges in order to learn Spanish. Alongside that, I’ve incorporated chatgpt into my life using mckay wrigleys chatbot-ui repo. This let’s me bypass pyaing OpenAi $20 a month and directly use their API instead.
The process is simple, go through poems and build a list of words I don’t know, and then it’s easy to ask GPT4 to translate a list of words into a well formatted table with usage, base verb, etc., but when I asked it to translate a certain line specifically from the poem Un Sábado - “fatiga ciertos limitados rumbos”, it required more context. I then asked it to find and translate the rest of the poem from wherever it looks and it proceeded to rewrite the poem, or find within itself a different poem based on the same name, and with the same Borges-ian style. Here it is:
The father writes. His pen scratches the page. The wife sits in the sun, idly sewing. The morning passes in that humble amusement that is also a form of prayer to ward off boredom.
In the afternoon, the friends arrive. The maté circulates, there is talk of distant things, of the great city that is a dream or a nightmare, of the world that is too big and too small.
Later, the book, the darkening room, the real and imagined memories of one’s own past, the invincible hope of being different from oneself, the shadows that the lamp ignites on the wall.
But in the last hours destinies cross paths, and everything that will happen occurs, already written in the stirring book of fate, in letters colored by an indecipherable ink.
On Saturdays, the abyss between us and the dead is not so great. We know that they seek us out, that in the vastness of space and time they are walking toward us with the slow gait of tigers.
On Saturdays, we glimpse with less horror the universe without purpose and without end.
These words, while not from Borges, could very well be. The same feeling of lifting the veil over a profound truth is still there. The poem generated here has pulled on something in me much deeper than the original, but it wasn’t real. Could there be a new art here - seeking new truths on modern topics in the style of old masters, could it even be called art?
Recent journals
This month is time to focus on connection, mastery is there with most of your moves and combinations, but figuring out which are the right moves for each person’s style, each point of time in music, are finally feeling as if they’re coming together. There’s an initial novice fear of repeating moves, as if each subsequent dance will be less intense if I use the same move again, but I found it highly untrue. It’s as if praticing it multiple times makes it easier, smoother, and tighter in time to the music, who would’ve thought?
Thoughts on style, your style, the philosophy in life you adopted, was it due to econoic situations, or was it truly figuring out what’s important in life and finally living it?