Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry

Reviews and Commentary for Transient Worlds

"Translation builds bridges and makes community. . . . Translating a poem with the aid of a fluent speaker builds trust and emotional connection; it forms a bridge where insight and understanding go back and forth. And issues of translating poetry from one language into another offer unexpected insights into creating one's own poetry. Instead of a materialist worldview where you gain at someone else's expense, translating poetry shows that the more you give, the more everyone has. As the twenty-fifth US Poet Laureate, I send Transient Worlds as my offering out into the world."--U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze

"Poetry has a crucial role to play in our lives. We're living in a very fast-paced world. We have the internet and social media and smart phones, and for that speed, we also sacrifice depth. We're losing depth of perception. You cannot speed-read a poem. Poetry communicates through sound and rhythm; it's best if you speak it aloud. [Transient Worlds] is designed in zones - if you only have 15 minutes, you can still read one section. . . . [Poetry] makes us slow down, and in doing that, it deepens our experience."--Arthur Sze

"Now more than ever, dismantling walls and cultural barriers will help to find the common ground that seems to be shifting and eroding underfoot. 'Translation, ' Sze affirms, 'builds bridges and makes connections.'"--Veronica Corpuz, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Poetry in translation is certainly a subject about which Sze is quite fluent, and we are the eager beneficiaries of [Transient Worlds]. . . .The Rilke poem [that concludes this collection] ends in wisdom: 'You must change your life.' I suspect Sze aims to help us do the same, one poetry translation at a time."--Nancy Naomi Carlson, On the Seawall

Praise for Arthur Sze

"Arthur Sze, one of the most acclaimed poets of our time, is celebrated for exploring the natural world, the human condition, and connections between cultures. . . . Sze's work invites readers to deepen their sense of place and reflect on the world around them."--PBS NewsHour

"[The Glass Constellation] is an overwhelming feast, a treasure, and more than enough proof that Sze is a major poet."―NPR

"Yoking the earth-bound and the heavenly, full of cosmic wonder, his individual lyrics and ambitious sequences balance a love of beauty and formal equipoise with an acknowledgement of violence and chance. A meticulous craftsperson, Sze honors the poignance of each moment we share while on earth by finding forms that capture what he calls 'the unrepeatable contour of this breath.'"--Judges' Citation, National Book Foundation Science + Literature Award Committee

"[Sze] brings together disparate realms of experience--astronomy, botany, anthropology, Taoism--and observes their correspondences with an exuberant attentiveness."--The New Yorker

"In a world that moves faster every day, Arthur Sze says poetry offers something increasingly rare: a chance to go slow."--Troy Aidan Sambajon, Christian Science Monitor

"Sze is simultaneously the microscope and telescope of the poetry world. And more. To truly attend to these poems is to begin to feel like you have been opened to a kaleidoscopic experience of the cosmos, a multisensual one whose kinetic foci gather moments across time and space, word and world."--Terrain

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.