Translating Classical Poetry into Modern Prose

arXiv:2606.02806v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce Padyam2Gadyam a dataset for the task of poem-to-prose translation from 13th-17th Century Telugu Classical Poetry to contemporary Telugu and English prose. The dataset consists of 600 poems and their human-verified Telugu and English prose translations. We evaluated 2 machine translation systems and 5 contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs) on their ability to do poem-to-prose translation into Telugu and English using this dataset. Our results indicate that while the general purpose LLMs are better than the machine translation systems for this task, there are systematic issues with the generation and evaluation of prose translation in both languages across systems.