There exists poetry that requires a lot of mathematical understanding! This is "literally" (and I mean literally in the literary sense) from a Stanislaw Lem story about an electronic bard, translated from Polish by Michael Kandel:
A love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit.
Response:
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converse, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a squared cosine 2 phi!
From The Cyberiad, by Stanislaw Lem.
Translated from Polish by Michael Kandel.
Here's a previous discussion of Marcin Wichary's translation of one of Lem's stories from Polish to English. He created the Lem Google Doodle, and he stalked and met Stanislaw Lem when he was a boy. Plus a discussion of Michael Kandel's translation of the poetry of the Electric Bard from The First Sally of Cyberiad, comparing it to machine translation:
>Lem’s fiction is filled with haunting, prescient landscapes. In these reissued and newly issued translations — some by the pitch-perfect Lem-o-phile, Michael Kandel — each sentence is as hard, gleaming and unpredictable as the next marvelous invention or plot twist. It’s hard to keep up with Lem’s hyper-drive of an imagination but always fun to try.
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/lem/WonderfulPoems.h...
Prompt:
A love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit.
Response:
From The Cyberiad, by Stanislaw Lem.Translated from Polish by Michael Kandel.
Here's a previous discussion of Marcin Wichary's translation of one of Lem's stories from Polish to English. He created the Lem Google Doodle, and he stalked and met Stanislaw Lem when he was a boy. Plus a discussion of Michael Kandel's translation of the poetry of the Electric Bard from The First Sally of Cyberiad, comparing it to machine translation:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28600200
Stanislaw Lem has finally gotten the translations his genius deserves:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/stanislaw...
>Lem’s fiction is filled with haunting, prescient landscapes. In these reissued and newly issued translations — some by the pitch-perfect Lem-o-phile, Michael Kandel — each sentence is as hard, gleaming and unpredictable as the next marvelous invention or plot twist. It’s hard to keep up with Lem’s hyper-drive of an imagination but always fun to try.