This is the longest blurb I've ever written, uneconomical but thereby able to give a fair summary of Martin Seligman's fascinating if imperfect book:
This book was written by a human, a curious, breezily autobiographical human, who has been involved for many decades in the long struggle of computer language processing and machine translation. He presents the surprise—his as much as anyone’s—of recent Chat-GPT-level AI’s sudden arrival. He shows it can now translate Pushkin almost as literally as Nabokov could or as artistically as other human translators. It can understand a Nabokov poem as well as most critics, and write an imitation of it under the authorial human’s own highly individual autobiographical prompts. Curiouser and curiouser, and kudos to MS, VN, and AI. This blurb was written by a human, BB, I don’t know why they needed me.
Nabokov would have been more disconcerted by the capacities of AI displayed here than most of us probably are--although that's not insignificant.
The Ada in the title is more Lovelace than Veen, but Nabokov is recurrent, especially as a translator of Pushkin and the poet of "Lines Written in Oregon."
New York: First Hill Books, 2026, but available now.
Brian Boyd
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