Although since characters are words, I guess that “room for interpretation” affords some combinatorial leniency, which you can’t get when spelling latin words.
It's still impressive---imagine writing 1000 words of English without reusing any function words like "the", "it", "of", "is". And just to show off, the Qianziwen holds a bunch of those words for the very last line!
I think it might be possible to do a literal translation into English that also eschews function words – since it's poetry, you can use a freely associating style.
E.g. the first rhyming couplet 天地玄黃 宇宙洪荒 was translated somewhat verbosely by Nathan Sturman as "The sky was black and earth yellow; space and time vast, limitless" but why many words when few do trick? "Dark sky, yellow earth; vast space, barren time."
To make it rhyme, you could replace "earth" by "lime" (referring to calcium oxide, not the fruit) but that would be very barren indeed.
> It's still impressive---imagine writing 1000 words of English without reusing any function words like "the", "it", "of", "is".
How about:
> Gadsby is a [260-page] 1939 novel by Ernest Vincent Wright which includes only four words that contain the letter E, the most common letter in English.
> [The novel] "A Void", translated from the original French La Disparition (lit. "The Disappearance"), is a 300-page French lipogrammatic novel, written in 1969 by Georges Perec, entirely without using the letter e, following Oulipo constraints. [0]
La Disparition / A void isn't just "without using that fifth glyph"; it's about a world without that fifth glyph, and uncanny discomfort from not having it but not knowing why, and trying to find illuminating truth.
If you don't want to visit that community, you can ask ChatGPT for non-fifth-glyph writing, most of which looks as if it is a copy from that community.
I was on an early mastodon instance where the fifth glyph was prohibited. It was really tough for me to do posts, but there was a person who was getting their PhD in linguistics, and if you didn't know that they had to avoid that letter, you'd never guess. Just amazing writing.
“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”
But with no repeated characters!
Although since characters are words, I guess that “room for interpretation” affords some combinatorial leniency, which you can’t get when spelling latin words.