# Translating Classical Poetry into Modern Prose

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02806 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02806/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04672/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models Are State-of-the-Art Evaluators of Translation Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14520/) (2023)
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- [IndicTrans2: Towards High-Quality and Accessible Machine Translation Models for all 22 Scheduled Indian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16307/) (2023)
- [Samanantar: The Largest Publicly Available Parallel Corpora Collection for 11 Indic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05596/) (2021)
- [Navigating the Metrics Maze: Reconciling Score Magnitudes and Accuracies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06760/) (2024)
- [Deep-speare: A Joint Neural Model of Poetic Language, Meter and Rhyme](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03491/) (2018)
- [Sonnet or Not, Bot? Poetry Evaluation for Large Models and Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18906/) (2024)
- [Don't Go Far Off: An Empirical Study on Neural Poetry Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02972/) (2021)
- [What is the Best Way for ChatGPT to Translate Poetry?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03450/) (2024)
- [Prose2Poem: The Blessing of Transformers in Translating Prose to Persian Poetry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14934/) (2021)
- [How Images Inspire Poems: Generating Classical Chinese Poetry from Images with Memory Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02994/) (2018)
- [PoeTone: A Framework for Constrained Generation of Structured Chinese Songci with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02515/) (2025)
- [Still Not There: Can LLMs Outperform Smaller Task-Specific Seq2Seq Models on the Poetry-to-Prose Conversion Task?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08145/) (2025)
- [A Computational Approach to Style in American Poetry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09357/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We built a dataset for the task of poem-to-prose translation from 13th-17th Century Telugu classical poetry to contemporary Telugu and English prose, which we call Padyam2Gadyam. The dataset consists of 600 poems and their human-verified Telugu and English prose translations. We evaluated 2 machine translation systems and 5 contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs) on their ability to do zero-shot poem-to-prose translation into Telugu and English using this dataset. Our results indicate that while the general purpose LLMs are better than the machine translation systems, there are systematic issues with the generation and evaluation of prose translation in both languages across systems.