Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry

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.