Now, /s?he/ did explicitly say "ramble about french poetry". There's a special place in Hell reserved for teachers who mean well but nonetheless manage to destroy their students' interest in a topic through their own incompetence.

In any case, I thought I'd point out that Douglas Hofstadter, of "Godel, Escher, Bach" fame, has written a book about the difficulty of translating french poetry, called "Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language". Haven't read it myself, though I understand that it includes some discussion of machine translation and AI.

-- Frag.