Posts by Ivana Hostová

Yes, and It Sometimes Is Like That, You Embrace Your Existence

March 3, 2022 | in Essays | by Ivana Hostová

A computer-generated collection of poetry in Slovak wins a national prize for poetry.

In 2020, the Slovak poet and intermedia artist Zuzana Husárová and the Slovak sound artist and software developer collaborated with Liza Gennart, a neural network they programmed, to write the poetry collection, Outcomes of Origin (2020, VLNA / Drewo a srd). To the surprise of many, the work won a major Slovak national award for poetry. In this essay, the second part of our coverage on Liza Gennart, the critic and scholar Ivana Hostová contextualizes the project within the rapidly developing field of electronic poetry, examines Liza Gennart’s subversive, unsettling poems, and explores their implications for our relationships with humanized machines. The following excerpts from Gennart’s collection were translated by Hostová.

Miscellanea 4.

Do you enter this world?
There is nothing to do. Not even in the bedroom, such misfortune, you leave it soak
in the brain and perhaps you also do it for my sake. But for my sake.

* late afternoon

* because it doesn’t sound like a reproach

* but you agree: it resembles a colourless key

* because wet words float out the window

Liza Gennart: Outcomes of Origin (Výsledky vzniku, 2020, VLNA / Drewo a srd), created by Zuzana Husárová and Ľubomír Panák, excerpt translated by Ivana Hostová.

In a recent ambitious attempt to comprehensively account for the lyric experience and practice in Western culture, Jonathan Culler in his Theory of the Lyric (2015) names the ritualistic as one of the defining features of what a poem has been over the centuries. Although Culler mostly excludes experimental writing including electronic poetry from his discussions and therefore restricts the scope of his analysis, the feeling of a ritual is surely present upon a readerly encounter with a book of poetry generated by one of our current Others—computers, neural networks, and machines. These, to our horror and admiration, have now absorbed the entire textual world produced during the whole history of humankind. We cannot help but wonder how much of what remains hidden from us they know and to what use they might put it. Instructing a neural network to write poetry provides an uncanny glimpse of such depths and shallow waters, reflecting the surfaces and masks of humanity.

Poetry generated by artificial intelligence, as research into readers’s responses shows, tends to be most interesting when it involves cooperation between human and non-human actors. One such project, Es Devlin’s Poem Pavilion at Expo 2020 in Dubai, creates poems—in English and Arabic—using words submitted by visitors which are then processed by an advanced machine learning algorithm. The creative possibilities of recent developments in natural language processing have inspired artists and poets all over the world and have given rise to poems, novels, and plays in languages with limited diffusion—including Slovak. The creative duo composed of poet and intermedia artist Zuzana Husárová and the sound artist and software developer Ľubomír Panák collaborated with a neural network Liza Gennart to create the collection Outcomes of Origin (2020, VLNA / Drewo a srd). The book—to the great shock of many—won the national prize for poetry, “Golden Wave,” in 2021.

“Liza seems to want a bright future, not just a virtual imagination”: An Interview with Slovak poet Zuzana Husárová

March 2, 2022 | in Interviews, Translator's Profile | by Ivana Hostová

I try to speak in a completely different language, one that sounds rather than articulates sentences fighting to invoke sense.

The poetry and artistic projects of the Slovak poet and researcher of electronic literature Zuzana Husárová explore various media, technologies, environments, and creative methods. In 2020, she and the sound artist and software developer Ľubomír Panák created a collection of poetry generated by a neural network they named Liza Gennart. To everyone’s surprise, their Outcomes of Origin (Výsledky vzniku, VLNA/Drewo a srd) won a Slovak national poetry prize. In this conversation, the first of our two-part coverage on Liza Gennart, the poet explains the creative process behind the project and addresses the frames within which it aims to be conceptualized.

Ivana Hostová (IH): Let me start with a hypothetical question. Would Liza like to have a body in Metaverse? If so, would she be more interested in fashion or in spreading political messages? Or would she perhaps boycott such an existence at all?

Zuzana Husárová (ZH): I believe she would boycott it. In the fictional world of Stephenson´s Snow Crash, people need metaverse (this use of the term inspired Facebook), since it provides an escape from a devastating, unbearable presence. As I understand Liza, she seems to want a bright future, not just a virtual imagination.

IH: So, who or what is Liza Gennart?

ZH: She is a Slovak poetry-writing neural network, based on a GPT-2 language model, fine-tuned on a literary corpus of over two thousand predominantly contemporary Slovak titles of mostly poetry.

IH: In the epilogue you wrote for Liza, you state that if humans acquaint the programmes with our literary heritage, neural networks might understand us better in the future. You also said that striving for a better mutual comprehension between humans and machines might have the potential to deepen humanity’s understanding of itself on the one hand and to humanize new technologies on the other. Can you elaborate on this idea?

ZH: On the technological level, the first step seems to be focusing on a relevant conceptualisation and building of a proper database for training. By that we mean a database one can trust in an ethical sense and whose results can bring defamiliarization. In that passage, I meant this acquainting more in the sense of literary thinking rather than poetry itself that could be humanising for new technologies. We are striving for a thorough rethinking of all steps one is taking in the process of working with new technologies, including the use of relevant language rather than pompous news devices and employment of ethics in all stages of working with, presenting, and promoting new technologies.

Coals to Newcastle: A (biased?) Slovak overview of a century in American literature

March 5, 2018 | in Essays | by Ivana Hostová and Peter Macsovszky

The ambition of the “American” issue of RSL was to resist preconceptions and cross boundaries.

Small cultures import disproportionately more texts—both translated and original—than they export. However, literatures using a language with a limited number of speakers are not just markets for globalised goods. Translations quite naturally also help them develop and sometimes even exist, as cases of small languages that ceased to be the target languages for translations show. Revue svetovej literatúry (Review of world literature) is a Slovak magazine founded in the “golden” 1960s that brought an abundance of new impulses to Slovak literature from all over the world for the past fifty years. Late last year, writer and translator (and Asymptote past contributor) Peter Macsovszky and literature and translation scholar Ivana Hostová edited and co-translated (with the help of a team of translators) an issue of the magazine with a focus on contemporary and twentieth-century Anglophone literature from the US.

In her Buying into English (2008), Catherine Prendergast analyses the semantics and economics linked to the ability of speakers of a minor language—in this case Slovak—to use the language of global communication. She compares the perceived value of English in Slovakia immediately after the fall of state socialism and then in almost two decades in the post-communist Slovakia. The strict restriction of the flow of information between socialist Czechoslovakia and the Western world gave rise to an idealised notion of the Anglophone (and, more specifically, American and capitalist) world. It came to signify freedom and prosperity and was—in the minds of many Slovaks—expected to embrace and accept with curiosity and eagerness the cultures and peoples freed from the socialist regime. Prendergast suggests that the notion was only abandoned after it slowly became clear that “the lingua franca is language-as-battlefield; it is the terrain upon which players in the global information economy grapple for property, respectability, and political voice.” Now it has become obvious that it takes more than pureness of heart and an admiration for the American culture and way of life to extract any interest from what Michael Cronin in his Eco-Translation (2017) has called the crowded Anglophone attentionscape.

The proportion of imported versus exported goods including cultural products can be very well illustrated by the amount of translations produced in the Anglophone countries as opposed to cultural spaces[i] like Slovakia. Therefore, wanting to import even more texts from the dominant to small culture might seem like carrying coals to Newcastle. However, if we try to differentiate between a piece of writing as a commodity that primarily generates economic profit and institutional legitimation and look at the autonomous sections of the literary field—at those works that were not created to make the author famous or rich, but which came into being in order to exist for themselves and in their own right—it may come as a surprise that not much American writing can really be found in Slovak translation. In this context, an issue of a Slovak literary magazine bringing translations of Anglophone writing from the United States seems redundant only at first glance. Most of the literature written in the US that gets translated into Slovak nowadays can best be described as a commodity—currently, the best-selling book in the biggest Slovak bookshops is the translation of Dan Brown’s Origin (2017)—it is the kind of writing that, although undeniably culturally domineering and shaping the receiving context, does not inspire in the sense of creating resistance to the existing (cultural) preconceptions or fluent strategies of reading.