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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. Using multiple translations of the same source poems—as well as original poems written by translators—he explores deep connections between the acts of writing and reading. 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 as tools that will unlock foreign-language works 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.
- GenresPoetryLanguageNonfiction
160 pages, Paperback
Published April 14, 2026
About the author
Arthur Sze
36 books80 followersArthur Sze (b. 1950 New York City) is a second-generation Chinese American poet.
Sze was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of eight books of poetry. His own poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Conjunctions, The Kenyon Review, Manoa, The Paris Review, Field, The New Yorker, and Virginia Quarterly Review, and have been translated into Albanian, Chinese, Dutch, Italian, Romanian, and Turkish.
He was a Visiting Hurst Professor at Washington University, a Doenges Visiting Artist at Mary Baldwin College, and has conducted residencies at Brown University, Bard College, and Naropa University. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and is the first poet laureate of Santa Fe.
He is the recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing fellowships, a George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship, three grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, and a Western States Book Award for Translation.
Sze was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of eight books of poetry. His own poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Conjunctions, The Kenyon Review, Manoa, The Paris Review, Field, The New Yorker, and Virginia Quarterly Review, and have been translated into Albanian, Chinese, Dutch, Italian, Romanian, and Turkish.
He was a Visiting Hurst Professor at Washington University, a Doenges Visiting Artist at Mary Baldwin College, and has conducted residencies at Brown University, Bard College, and Naropa University. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and is the first poet laureate of Santa Fe.
He is the recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing fellowships, a George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship, three grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, and a Western States Book Award for Translation.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 30, 2026
This is essential a series of close reading essays. Would have been better to read before my exam tbh. It’s fine! If you’re into translation you’ll really dig this. Sze is so deeply knowledgeable it’s incredible. A fantastic choice for poet laureate. I wish he had included more of his own translations because I appreciated his choices a lot in the one he included.
July 24, 2026
I really enjoyed the poems with multiple translations, because comparing how different people interpreted the same source material was fascinating. This book is concise and approachable, with many different countries and languages represented. A quick read that is still thought-provoking. I don't think I've ever read a book about translation before, and it was interesting to consider the balance between the literal meaning and the spirit of the meaning when translating a piece of writing.
Review of advance copy received from Edelweiss+
Just as people are fond of saying, "the book is always better than the movie," there is an idea -- widely accepted as truism -- that goes, "a translation can never be as good as its source poem." I don't buy either of those views, but there's certainly truth to the notion that a poetic translation can never perfectly echo style, tone, sound quality, and meaning at once. Each language is unique, and the more different two languages are the more one has to make decisions about what one will emulate and what one will craft. It's also true that any translation will represent a drift away from the culture of the original (which is not identical to being worse.) In short, any poetry translation that seeks to be good had better be a work of art unto itself.
The current US Poet Laureate (as of this writing,) Arthur Sze, has written a book to help readers intelligently navigate the troubled waters of poetic translation. Sze certainly has insight, having not only translated Chinese poems himself, but also being Professor Emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts, he has multiple cultural lenses with which to view poetry.
This book consists of fifteen chapters exploring poems and poetry excerpts from around the globe -- and their translations. The twelve diverse source languages include: Chinese, Navajo, French, Ancient Greek, Hebrew, Danish, and Russian. The original poets include Tao Qian, Guillaume Apollinaire, Homer, Kobayashi Issa, Pablo Neruda, Marina Tsvetaeva, Aime Cesaire, Najwan Darwish, and Mirabai. Many of the chapters include multiple translations, offering the reader a means to see how different translators take to the task. Others offer only a single translation but turn their attention to specific considerations of translation. In one case, there is an interview with the translator. I enjoyed this varied approach to the exploring the topic. It made for a book with zero monotony and many facets.
If you are a poet or a poetry reader who enjoys reading poetry from varied languages or source languages, I'd highly recommend this book.
The current US Poet Laureate (as of this writing,) Arthur Sze, has written a book to help readers intelligently navigate the troubled waters of poetic translation. Sze certainly has insight, having not only translated Chinese poems himself, but also being Professor Emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts, he has multiple cultural lenses with which to view poetry.
This book consists of fifteen chapters exploring poems and poetry excerpts from around the globe -- and their translations. The twelve diverse source languages include: Chinese, Navajo, French, Ancient Greek, Hebrew, Danish, and Russian. The original poets include Tao Qian, Guillaume Apollinaire, Homer, Kobayashi Issa, Pablo Neruda, Marina Tsvetaeva, Aime Cesaire, Najwan Darwish, and Mirabai. Many of the chapters include multiple translations, offering the reader a means to see how different translators take to the task. Others offer only a single translation but turn their attention to specific considerations of translation. In one case, there is an interview with the translator. I enjoyed this varied approach to the exploring the topic. It made for a book with zero monotony and many facets.
If you are a poet or a poetry reader who enjoys reading poetry from varied languages or source languages, I'd highly recommend this book.
June 1, 2026
Arthur Sze is the 7th bilingual poet in the title’s United States history and only the 5th second-generation American to hold the position. Transient Worlds presents a vision of translated poetry that is expansive in audience, form, epoch and cultural background.
The book is split into 15 Zones and each Zone is dedicated to a different non-Anglophone poet, whose original poetry is accompanied by English translation examples and a discussion where Sze touches on the biography of the poet, the poetry selected and the craft of the translations.
Its expansiveness in regard to audience is notable from the very first Zone; in it, Sze transliterates a poem from early 400s Chinese poet Tao Qian, providing the original Chinese characters, the Pinyin phonetic translation and the words in English under each character. Sze then invites the reader to create their own translation. This invitation immediately debunks the commonly-held presupposition about who can participate in the appreciation or creation of translation – namely, those that are proficient in the language being translated.
In the book’s introduction, Sze shares how when he taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts in New Mexico and invited his Native students to translate Ancient Chinese poems into English, it was not only creativity-sparking, but “crucial in helping students develop their own voices and visions as poets writing in English.” In this way, his intention for the collection is “as a guide for widening and deepening the appreciation of poetry through the lens of translation.”
Will return to link my full review when it's published. Thanks to Copper Canyon Press for providing me a copy of this incredible book!
The book is split into 15 Zones and each Zone is dedicated to a different non-Anglophone poet, whose original poetry is accompanied by English translation examples and a discussion where Sze touches on the biography of the poet, the poetry selected and the craft of the translations.
Its expansiveness in regard to audience is notable from the very first Zone; in it, Sze transliterates a poem from early 400s Chinese poet Tao Qian, providing the original Chinese characters, the Pinyin phonetic translation and the words in English under each character. Sze then invites the reader to create their own translation. This invitation immediately debunks the commonly-held presupposition about who can participate in the appreciation or creation of translation – namely, those that are proficient in the language being translated.
In the book’s introduction, Sze shares how when he taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts in New Mexico and invited his Native students to translate Ancient Chinese poems into English, it was not only creativity-sparking, but “crucial in helping students develop their own voices and visions as poets writing in English.” In this way, his intention for the collection is “as a guide for widening and deepening the appreciation of poetry through the lens of translation.”
Will return to link my full review when it's published. Thanks to Copper Canyon Press for providing me a copy of this incredible book!
May 12, 2026
What a gift this book is, to those who love poetry and love works in translation. The craft of translating a poem is both experienced and explained, in a beautiful survey of poetry across the globe and across the centuries.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews