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.