Discover how AI fills in Sappho’s blanks on Mem’s blog. Explore the intersection of ancient poetry and modern technology. Click to delve deeper!
Photo by Liam Matthews on Unsplash
I’ve been interested in attempts to decipher codes and ancient languages since I borrowed one of my father’s books on the Enigma machine as kid and first learned about the efforts of the Bletchey Park cryptographers to crack its code during the Second World War. I even ended up writing my dissertation, in part, on how Renaissance thinkers tried to read Egyptian hieroglyphs, centuries before Jean-François Champollion realized that the script combined both phonetic and ideographic elements by studying the inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone. So I’m currently following with interest the stories of AI being applied to reconstruct texts in ancient languages. One team of researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are enlisting AI in their effort to decipher the Indus script, examples of which have been found on more than 4000 objects in modern-day India and Pakistan, by training an algorithm on common patterns in how languages change over time and then supplying it with words in a lost language that need to be aligned with words in a known, related language. Meanwhile, another group of scholars and researchers from British AI lab DeepMind have banded together to develop Ithaca, an AI system that can propose text to complete Greek inscriptions that only survive in a partial state, as well as determining where and when those inscriptions were likely to have been made by drawing on contextual linguistic clues.
I was particularly struck by the project of Ithaca because of my interest in the Greek poet Sappho. Sappho, who was born around 630 BC, wrote some of the most direct and evocative poetry that exists, even now, on the subject of love. Her lyrics were revered in antiquity – while Homer was known among the Greeks as “The Poet”, Sappho was his female counterpart, “The Poetess”. And yet despite her glowing reputation among her peers, only one of her poems survives intact today. We may have lost some of her writings due to the early Church’s horror of her “loose” morals – Sappho speaks frankly about her desire for both men and women –, resulting in the deliberate destruction of her work. Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, our knowledge of Sappho’s poetry was restricted to what had been quoted of it in other ancient writers’ texts, though such citations were rarely in full; in one particularly frustrating example, the proto-literary-critic Longinus cites and discusses a substantial fragment of one of Sappho’s poems in his poetic manual On the Sublime, but doesn’t record its final few lines. When a trove of Sappho’s writings was retrieved during a series of excavations at Oxyrhynchus in the late 1800s and early 1900s, time and the elements had done their work, and much of the papyrus on which the poems were written had degraded, making them impossible to read without interruption.
For some scholars, the fact that – bar one – Sappho’s poems exist only in fragmentary state makes them all the more powerful. Daniel Mendelsohn quotes Thomas Habink, a classicist at the University of Southern California, in a New Yorker article from 2015: “The fragmentary preservation of poems of yearning and separation serves as a reminder of the inevitable incompleteness of human knowledge and affection.” But literary scholars are good at making a virtue out of necessity, and there’s a fine but definitive line between a mystery that excites and a mystery that frustrates. While Habink’s claim does feel true for some of the poems, I can’t say I feel much stimulation staring down a page of square brackets relieved only by a single word or short phrase – “to Kypris”, “Atthis for you”, “in a thin voice”, “lady”, “deep sound”.
Those quotations, by the way, are from Anne Carson’s 2002 work, If Not, Winter, one of the fullest and most beautiful English translations of Sappho’s poetry. Carson is a classicist, but she’s also a poet herself; in her translation, the single square brackets that are typically used to indicate missing matter in a source serve an aesthetic function as well as a scholarly one. In her prefatory note on “marks and lacks” throughout the text, Carson writes:
It is not the case that every gap or illegibility is specifically indicated: this would render the page a blizzard of marks and inhibit reading. Brackets are an aesthetic gesture toward the papyrological event rather than an accurate record of it. I have not used brackets in translating passages, phrases or words whose existence depends on citation by ancient authors, since these are intentionally incomplete. I emphasize the distinction between brackets and no brackets because it will affect your reading experience, if you allow it. Brackets are exciting. Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp – brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure.
Brackets – and the gaps in the text they indicate – stimulate our imagination, Carson says. And I wondered, as I reread If Not, Winter recently, if they would also stimulate the “imagination” of GPT-3. What would an AI program make of Sappho’s fragments, in Carson’s translation? What would it be able to dream up to fill in those maddening, intoxicating gaps in poetry written more than 2500 years ago?
As I was dealing with a work in translation, and thus not seriously attempting to recover the words that Sappho wrote, I didn’t use any form of fine-tuning for my initial GPT-3 set-up. I gave GPT-3 the below prompt, followed by a sample input (a fragment in which I had introduced artificial blanks) and sample output (the “complete” fragment of poetry):
Sappho ( c. 630 – c. 570 BC) was an Archaic Greek poet. She is known for her lyric poetry, much of which is now lost or survives only in fragments. She wrote extensively on love and desire, both heterosexual and homosexual.
Fill in the [blank] to complete these fragments of Sappho’s poetry. One [blank] can represent one or several words. Do not alter or omit any of the words that feature in the input.
Input:
night
girls
all [blank]
might sing of the [blank] between you and the bride
with violets in her lap
wake! and [blank]
the young men so that
no more than [blank]
shall we sleep
Output:
all night long
might sing of the love between you and the bride
wake! and go call
no more than the bird with piercing voice
I then gave GPT-3 the following input, a fragment that is riddled with several blanks in Carson’s translation:
[blank] waiting
[blank] in sacrifices
[blank] having good
[blank]
[blank] but going
[blank] for we know
[blank] of works
[blank] after
[blank] and toward
[blank] says this
Then, I asked it to generate an output. This was the result:
The gods waiting
angry in sacrifices
not having good
pleased
but going
home for we know
the end of works
long
after dark and toward