Between Giraffes and Ghost Lines: What Writing About Poetry Taught Me

 Writing about poetry is never just about poetry. It’s about listening closely line by line, breath by breath until something clicks, or at least begins to take shape. That’s exactly what I felt while working on my article about Judith Beveridge’s The Domesticity of Giraffes. What began as a project to compare two translations, one by Sapardi Djoko Damono and the other by ChatGPT, quickly became something much more personal, more difficult, and oddly enough, more enjoyable than I expected.

I chose this particular poem not just because it’s beautifully written, but because it stands out as one of Beveridge’s most celebrated works. The Domesticity of Giraffes received major literary awards in 1988, including the Mary Gilmore Award and the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award. That kind of recognition told me one thing: this poem matters. And the more I read it, the more I understood why. It’s quiet but intense, strange but familiar. It speaks of captivity, longing, and memory and does so through the eyes of a giraffe. That mix of tenderness and wildness made me want to stay with the poem longer, to see what would happen if I peeled back the language layer by layer.

Judith Beveridge herself is a name that deserves attention. Born in London in 1956 and raised in Australia, she’s not just a poet but also an editor and academic who has played a huge role in shaping modern Australian poetry. Her works often explore the delicate tension between nature, spirituality, and the inner world. What struck me most is her ability to avoid personal confessions in favor of imagined voices—animals, strangers, unknown narrators which paradoxically make the poems feel even more human. That ability is what makes The Domesticity of Giraffes so rich to analyze. It’s not a story about Judith. It’s a story about something bigger perhaps about all of us.

But writing the article wasn’t easy. Translating poetry is like carrying water with your hands: something always slips through. I found myself agonizing over how to explain a single word choice or why one version of a line felt flatter than another. Comparing Sapardi’s interpretation, a seasoned poet who knows when to bend language, with ChatGPT’s more literal, sometimes robotic take, made me question the role of intention, intuition, and even emotion in translation. Is it enough to preserve meaning? Or should we also preserve feeling?

Still, despite the confusion, the rewrites, and the late-night frustration, I found joy in the process. There’s a certain satisfaction in wrestling with ambiguity, in catching the subtle beauty of a metaphor, or in realizing why Beveridge chose to describe loneliness "like smoke." You start the paper trying to explain a poem. Somewhere along the way, the poem explains something about you.

Looking back, this was more than just an academic task. It was a chance to slow down and really listen to Beveridge’s voice, to the giraffe’s silence, and to my own uncertain, curious thoughts. That’s the strange gift of poetry: it makes you work for every inch of meaning, but it always gives something back.