Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry

Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry is a personal guide to global poetry in translation by 25th US Poet Laureate Arthur Sze. Focusing on an accessible selection of key works, Sze takes readers through nearly two millennia of poetry from every part of the world, constructing fifteen different "zones" of literary discussion with a critical focus on the artistic dimensions of translation itself. To do this, Sze engages multiple translations of the same source poems--as well as original poems written by translators--to explore deep connections between the acts of writing and reading. In Zone 10, for instance, Sze presents two translations of a single poem by Marina Tsvetaeva, the first a well-known standard and the second by a poet who speaks no Russian and employed a Russian-speaking friend to help translate the poem phrase by phrase. In another Zone, Sze presents a famous passage from the Iliad, but rather than present another translation, Sze instead juxtaposes a contemporary poem that uses numerous elements of the Iliad as a springboard to write through the original Greek and into an original work in English.

Ultimately, Sze invites readers to consider their own acts of engaged reading as a creative pursuit, giving them tools to begin translating poems themselves as well tools that will unlock foreign-language works--even from languages of very little familiarity--as inspirational sources. At its core, this unique anthology, published in association with the Library of Congress, showcases a profound goal of global literary citizenship: to open works up to all readers and to encourage poetic creativity at the fundamental level of language itself.

Arthur Sze is the twenty-fifth poet laureate of the United States and author of twelve books of poetry, including Into the Hush (2025); The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2021), selected for a 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature Prize; Sight Lines (2019), for which he received the National Book Award; Compass Rose (2014), a Pulitzer Prize finalist; The Ginkgo Light (2009), selected for the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Book Award; Quipu (2005); The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998 (1998), selected for the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Asian American Literary Award; and Archipelago (1995), selected for an American Book Award. He has also published The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry(2024) and edited Chinese Writers on Writing (2010). Another collection, The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems, was published by the Museum of New Mexico Press in spring 2025.

Sze is a recipient of the 2025 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry for lifetime achievement, the 2024 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Jackson Poetry Prize, a Lannan Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, and a Howard Foundation Fellowship, as well as five grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. He is the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, where he lives with his wife, the poet Carol Moldaw. A chancellor emeritus of the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Sze was the 2023-2024 Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University. His poetry has been translated into fifteen languages, including Chinese, Dutch, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts.