“The more you give, the more everyone has” - Arthur Sze, Transient Worlds

Close your eyes and imagine a translator. Are they male? Undoubtedly. Are they white? Most likely! Are they someone you’d be excited to grab a drink with? I’m gonna guess, probably not.

In 2026, we are still in the throes of decolonizing our literary canon. The genre of translation is a critical frontier in this campaign, and it’s one that America’s most recently appointed Poet Laureate, Arthur Sze, tackles with his latest book Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry, published by Copper Canyon Press. 

Arthur Sze is the seventh 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. Sze splits the book into fifteen Zones and each Zone is dedicated to a different non-Anglophone poet, whose original poetry is accompanied by English translations,a biography of the poet, the selections, as well as  the process of each translation.

Its expansiveness in regard to audience is established in Zone 1; in it, Sze transliterates a poem from early 400’s 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 presupposition about who can participate in the appreciation or creation of translation– namely, those that are proficient in the language being translated. As a translator myself, in a language where my fluency isn’t complete, this was a groundbreaking moment to receive from someone as practiced and proficient in translation as Arthur Sze.

In the book’s introduction, Sze shares a time when he invited his Native students at the Institute of American Indian Arts 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.”

Zone 2 reinforces capaciousness with a visual poem selection that fills the page with a single compound word from Navajo (Diné) poet Orlando White. It is a compound word that holds untranslatable vastness, “a vision of the cosmos, of all that exists” and of the interconnectedness between spiritual and physical realms. 

This initiates Sze’s expansive view of poetic forms, complemented by selections such as Guillame Apollinaire’s visual poem The Carnation, which he uses to remind us that “a poet is, etymologically, a maker.” Thus, a poet’s creative play and humor, as displayed by Apollinaire, is just as valid in “creat[ing] a moment in time” within a poem, as the more structured forms we can sometimes privilege as more ‘skillful’ or valid demonstrations of poetic prowess. In this, Sze forges another crack in conceptions of poetry and translation as stagnant or straight-forward, opening us up to a wider spectrum of possibilities in these genres.

In Zone 14, Sze develops his ideas on form in a discussion with Chloe Martinez on her translations of Mirabai, a Rajput, Northern princess and mystic poet. Martinez describes how her role as translated evolved throughout years of working with Mirabai’s poetry; eventually, she saw herself “less like a xerox machine, more like a singer interpreting a song.” This resulted in the choice to retain the original’s formal constraint of couplets, while incorporating contemporary language that elicits the intimacy between Krishna and Mira, the speaker of the poems. From ‘Mira Wears God’s Clothes’:

My teachers, it’s so hard to be conventional! How to even explain?
Mira says, what if I met with my mountain-lifting Lord

and stayed just like that, with him? 

Transient Worlds enriches our understanding of history and culture through the lens of translation. 

In Zone 9, Sze spotlights Song of Songs, romantic poetry from the Bible whose author is unknown. Alongside the original Hebrew, Sze includes an English translation from Jewish academic and poet Marcia Falk, as well as a secondary work by the Mayan mythic poet, Búffalo Conde—a persona of the Indigenous Mexican poet Pédro Perez Conde, whose work seeks to reconcile pre-Columbian Mesoamerican mythology with biblical texts. 

Sze presents Búffalo Conde’s Song of Songs-inspired poem in native Tzeltal, in Spanish, and then the Spanish is translated into English by Michael Weigers. Here are the last lines of each iteration alongside each other:

"הַתְּאֵנָה חָנְטָה פַגֶּיהָ, וְהַגְּפָנִים סְמָדַר נָתְנוּ רֵיחַ; קוּמִי לְכִי־לָךְ רַעְיָתִי יָפָתִי וּלְכִי־לָךְ."

“Come with me,
my love,
come away”

“ja / sk’op jmamalal te ya x-ik’ awan”

“Es la voz de mi esposo que llama”

“It is the voice of my husband that calls”

Sze exhibits how, in translation, “lines of authenticity and originality become blurred,” how translation can be “a subversive act that undercuts colonial borders” and how its “blend of culture as [language] move across and transcend them.” 

This achievement of Transient Worlds is easy to miss—underneath the valuable craft lessons and the beauty of his selections, Sze’s work has an unmistakable, decolonial infrastructure. So often, the translations most amplified in literary spaces contain existential generalities like romance and pain, expressed in ways that do not prick the conscience of the Westernized mind. Rarely is the English reader engaging with the poetry of abolitionists or exiles, of those that seek to eradicate the exploitative systems that built the nations we inhabit.

In the last few Zones of the book, Sze includes the work of Aimé Césaire and Najwan Darwish. Aimé Césaire’s French is one marked deeply by colonization; as a poet whose literary life was never divorced from activism, his foundational role in the Négritude literary movement became a stepping stone into political life, where he not only abolished Martinique’s status as a French colony, but became its President. So, Sze is not exaggerating when he comments that Césaire’s linguistic choice to incorporate Bantu surrealism into his poems, is work that “demolishes hierarchy" and centers the heart over a (Western) mind that seeks to control. From Serpent Sun, translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith:

the water raises the carcasses of light lost in the pompless corridor

whirlwinds of ice floes halo the streaming hearts of ravens

our hearts

is the voice of tamed thunderbolts turning on their cracked hinges

Césaire’s poetry in translation is followed by the Arabic of Najwan Darwish, a Jerusalem-born, Palestinian poet. The translation of his poem We Never Stop by Kareem James Abu-Zeid reads:

The people had a single country,
mine multiplied in loss,
renewed itself in absence.
Its roots, like mine, are water:
If it stops it withers,
if it stops it dies.

Sze remarks on how this poem “transcends the context it was written in…the speaker of the poem and the country are always in tension, always running.”

When I translate the poetry of C.P Cavafy, which often exists in a tight, single-stanza block, my inclination is to break open the form so the depth of the language can breathe. Sometimes, as I’m experimenting during the drafting stage, I can hear this uninvited voice, the voice whom Anton Hur refers to as the “mythical English reader,” harangue me for messing so much with the original structure. I wonder what the mythical English reader would say about Alice Oswald’s book-length poem, Memorial, which is an excavation of Homer’s Iliad—they would probably have uninteresting things to say about it. Sze on the other hand, affirms Oswald’s work as an act of “transformation [that] breathe[s] life into the interstices of an ancient text.”

As a translator, these selections have liberated me to trust translation’s voluminosity – to shed notions of it as an academic process, and remember that poetry always asks for our creativity, wants it desperately.  

Transient Worlds illustrates how translation is a stream that never runs dry, an “inter-pollinating” creature, a “vehicle” that helps us “awaken to the possibilities—and expand the resources—of our shared language.” Arthur Sze invites us into this expansive practice, to transcend genre, and to experience language’s generosity and its unending abundance.