AI, Intuition, and the Ghazal-Novel: What Writers Can Learn from Hamid Ismailov and Shelley Fairweather-Vega
Novelist Hamid Ismailov and translator Shelley Fairweather-Vega visited Swarthmore to talk about their collaborative novel, "We Computers," a 2025 National Book Award finalist for Translated Literature. After an introduction by Susan W. Lippincott Professor Sibelan Forrester, Ismailov read in Uzbek and Fairweather-Vega followed with the English. The room heard the book's core tension: human intuition meeting machine logic, all inside a single text.
A dream that rewires a writing life
In the passage they read, Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam appears in a dream to the protagonist, Abdulhamid Ismail ("A.I."), and points him to the Turkish poet Nedîm. The next day, A.I. discovers Nedîm in the historical record - exactly as described. That discovery becomes a creative catalyst.
Ismailov said the scene mirrors his own experience. He didn't play coy about the mystery of it, either: "AI is the ultimate representation of linear, rational thinking… We've got intuition. We've got a mystical side." He treats that ambiguity as a feature, not a bug, of writing.
Co-writing with a machine (and a critic in your head)
Ismailov's interest in AI predates large language models. "We Computers" draws from his long collaboration with French writer and researcher Jean-Pierre Balpe, an early builder of computer-generated literature. In the novel, an author named Jon-Perse debates Ismailov's stand-in about what authorship even means.
Balpe's position: poetry is just words, and readers project themselves into it, so biography doesn't matter. Ismailov disagrees. He fictionalizes their lives in the book, but keeps the arguments intact - which lets the text run both the human thread (motives, life, history) and the algorithmic thread (structure, language, pattern) side-by-side.
Hafez, dirty jokes, and why "high art" breathes better when it's messy
Ismailov weaves a partly invented life of Hafez through the novel. Fairweather-Vega noted those sections were the hardest to translate because of their raw slang. Ismailov's point: the crudeness isn't shock value - it shows writers living full, unfiltered lives.
That choice breaks the museum-glass case around "lofty" literature. It also gives translators real texture to work with: friction, tone, and cultural in-jokes. You feel the community on the page.
The ghazal as a model for modern prose
At the heart of the project is form. "We Computers" is the first ghazal-novel - a blend of poetry and prose that treats voice like a system of mirrors. Ismailov wants what he calls a "polytextual" novel: multiple modes of thought running at once, as they do in your mind.
Why the ghazal? In Persian and Turkic languages, grammatical gender doesn't pin down the beloved. The poem stays open: a person, a divine presence, something unnamed. That ambiguity - and the form's journey across languages - gives it productive dislocation. You're always reaching across a gap, and that reach creates energy.
Practical takeaways for working writers
- Blend modes on purpose. Try pairing a factual thread with a dream thread. Let them argue on the page.
- Use form as a constraint. Draft a scene as a mini-ghazal: couplets with a recurring image and a subtle turn in each.
- Let biography inform voice. Machines can arrange words; your life gives them charge. Add one lived detail per page that no model would guess.
- Co-write with AI, don't outsource. Ask a model for variations on structure or diction, then rewrite for meaning, rhythm, and intent.
- Translate yourself. Take a paragraph you've written and "translate" it into a different register (vulgar, formal, technical). Keep the bones, change the skin.
- Make room for the unexplainable. If a dream, memory shard, or gut pull shows up, capture it verbatim. Edit later, not sooner.
Process experiments to try this week
- Ghazal warm-up: Write 10 couplets tethered by a single image. No explanation. Then stitch three into your current chapter.
- Two-author draft: Write a page as "you," then a page as your "AI collaborator" who believes biography doesn't matter. Merge the best lines.
- Ambiguity pass: Remove every sentence that over-explains motive. Replace with sensory detail or dialog.
- Translator's test: Take the rawest line in your draft and render it three ways - slang-heavy, neutral, and elevated - then choose the one that sharpens intent.
Where this leaves us
Ismailov doesn't see AI as a threat to poetry. He sees a new set of tools for play - while insisting that human ambiguity, memory, and biography keep the work alive. Literature, he reminded the room, "does not exist in time. It is language that takes us beyond specific time and place."
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