The untranslatability of Literaturnost revisited in the era of artificial intelligence

Abstract

This paper revisits Roman Jakobson’s literaturnost within the framework of modern poetics and in light of the challenge posed by artificial intelligence to human literary translation. It is argued that literary translation is, in essence, more of a project of code transposition and meaning generation than of message transmission. Furthermore, it is noted that although algorithms can process certain literary devices, they are currently unable to process the polysystemic relations that constitute an artwork’s literaturnost. Consequently, it is emphasized that meaning transferal, meaning generation, and the revolt against meaning will continue to pose barriers for future machine translation even in the long term.