You can copy an existing book, word for word (maybe not even that if it uses a different character set, unless you're doing photocopies).

Write a new book without understanding the language? No way - not one that makes any sense. Not unless you're going with the "million monkeys" approach (and if you did try that approach, you wouldn't live long enough to succeed in writing one actual coherent book in the foreign language).

So, we could think about trying to simulate a human brain, neuron by neuron. That's the "making a photocopy" approach. But that's not the approach we're pursuing. We're trying to write a new book (create a new, non-human intelligence) in a language we don't understand (that is, not knowing what intelligence/consciousness actually is).

(Side topic: What would happen if you asked GPT-4 to write a full-length novel? Or even a story as long as the token limit? Would you get anything coherent?)