Title: Converting Classical Verse into Contemporary Narrative

Abstract: This paper presents Padyam2Gadyam, a novel dataset designed for the specific task of translating poetry into prose. The collection features works from 13th- to 17th-century Telugu classical literature, rendered into both modern Telugu and English prose. Comprising 600 poems, each entry includes human-verified translations in both target languages. To assess current capabilities, we benchmarked five contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs) on their proficiency in performing poem-to-prose translation across both languages. Our findings reveal that while performance varies among the models, there is significant potential for enhancement in both Telugu and English outputs. Furthermore, through a qualitative examination, we explore the strengths and weaknesses of existing machine translation evaluation methodologies when applied to this unique linguistic task.

Source: arXiv Generated at: 2026-06-03 00:00:00 UTC