An experiment with translingual rhymes

For some time I have been curious about how words in one language could possibly rhyme with words in a another language. Often sounds present in one are absent in another. When composing a verse one must carefully choose a word whose ending would have a phoneme that would have a close approximation in the language of the next rhyming verse.

I searched around a bit, but could not find a poem that consistently used this stylistic choice. It is understandable that this idea is not a popular choice, perhaps due to the expectation that readers would need to be fluent in two or more languages in order to understand it.

Despite that, I wanted to experiment with this idea. This is my first attempt at this unconventional style of composition using four languages: English, Portuguese, French and German.

Finsternis

As I looked out the window
algo estranho me assustou.
Alles wurde plötzlich dunkel
des étoiles visibles dans le ciel.

Finsternis aus dem Fenster hinaus
é só impressão ou é real?
Sans que je m’en rendre compte
of all the time I spent.

So viel Zeit ist schon vorbei
c’est déjà arrivée la nuit.
Regrettably there is no way
de recuperar o que desperdicei.

Using AI for Translation

I have used an AI tool to speed up the translation of this blog post, excluding the poem. The text was then manually revised by me afterwards. This is also an experiment I have long wanted to try, as I have little time to write and it takes a long time to manually translate all the versions of each blog entry.

The verses themselves were, of course, manually written in their own languages. Even though I can understand and communicate in those languages reasonably well, I must admit that my knowledge of them is not perfect. So I used an AI assistant for the sole purpose of detecting and helping fix any grammatical errors, of which were just a couple. Out of curiosity, I have also experimented asking it to generate one more stanza. It got the language alternations between verses right, but everything else was terrible: the words didn’t rhyme at all and the verses took a very uncreative direction. That part was to be expected because language models are based on the probability of the next likely word.

If you can’t read all four of those languages, you’re welcome to use automated tools to translate them to your preferred language.

Concluding Thoughts

In all, it was an interesting experience. While the challenges of creating verses that rhyme across multiple languages are significant, finding words that rhyme and make sense in the context is a good exercise to my vocabulary and an enjoyable puzzle in itself. I found the process to be creatively stimulating. I would like to do more of that.