**From the 25th U.S. Poet Laureate**
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.
ISBN: 9781556597329
Format: Paperback
from “Drinking Wine #5” by Tao Qian
I built my house near where others live,
and yet without noise of horse or carriage.
You ask, how can this be?
A distant mind leaves the earth around it.
I pick chrysanthemums below the eastern fence,
then gaze at mountains to the south.
The mountain air is fine at sunset;
flying birds go back in flocks.
In this there is a truth:
I wish to tell you, but lose the words.
—Translated by Arthur Sze
Reviews
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 poetry of Arthur Sze contains wonder and losses; it’s there in his latest collection, Into the Hush. . . the natural world and our place in it, human dramas, history.”―Jeffrey Brown, PBS NewsHour
“[The Glass Constellation] is an overwhelming feast, a treasure, and more than enough proof that Sze is a major poet.”―NPR
“[Sze] brings together disparate realms of experience—astronomy, botany, anthropology, Taoism—and observes their correspondences with an exuberant attentiveness.”―The New Yorker
“Sze’s is a deeply humanist and erotic sensibility, utilizing an unadorned diction and language steeped in the metaphoric possibilities that exist for us by mere dint of being human.”―Chicago Review
“Arthur Sze is a demanding and valuable poet. . . . While the influence of Eastern poetry is usually felt in American poetry as imagism, in Sze’s poems, that tradition is present not just as a quality of perception, but of thought—made available to us in all its complexity through a precision of language so refined that it feels like marksmanship.”―Antioch Review
“Arthur Sze is not only one of our best poets, he’s now also one of our great translators.”―Charles Simic
“If only a few books were to survive civilization’s collapse, were to stand as ‘poems of evidence’ that life once flourished, I would hope Arthur Sze’s to be among them.”―AGNI
“Sze’s poetry invokes an ecology, or philosophy, of interconnectedness not unlike the central metaphor of Chinese Huayan Buddhism—the image of Indra’s Net—where all phenomena are single jewels holding within themselves the infinite reflections of every other jewel in existence.”―World Literature Today