Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry: A Book Review

On Reflecting the Light: A Book Review

An excerpt from  New York Times Interview with Arthur Sze

How did you decide which poems to anthologize in “Transient Worlds”?

I wanted to blur the boundaries between reading, writing, translating poetry and writing original poetry. To do so I chose 23 poems from 13 languages, frequently selecting multiple translations of the same poem....
I started with poems that I loved, from Tao Qian’s “Drinking Wine” to Pablo Neruda’s “Sólo la Muerte” to Sappho 31. My method of selection was also informed by Indra’s net, which asserts that everything that happens in the cosmos is like a piece of glass suspended in an immense chandelier. When light shines into this space, each sliver of glass, each hanging jewel absorbs and reflects the light of every other.

Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry is a fascinating read. Nearly all of the 23 poems have been translated by more than one person, allowing the reader to consider greater possibilities of meaning. In addition, Sze has provided background information about each poet, information about the original language, and more context. The poetry selections are excellent.Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish's "We Never Stop" is published in Transient Worlds. "I turned rebellion into poetry; rebellion turned me into a poet," said Najwan Darwish about his writing. Sze's anthology is a rich collection and it's also useful for teachers of poetry. Sze has often used translations to help students not only learn about the poem but also to learn about various poetic choices. He says the practice of translating, even if one is not fluent in the original language of the poem, will facilitate development of the student poets' own voices.  

The book is published by Copper Canyon Press, 2026. 

Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish's "We Never Stop" is haunting and evokes the plight of many people in the world, including those who are being cruelly detained and deported by Trump's campaign against immigration. You can read Darwish's poem on the poet's website.  http://www.najwandarwish.com/ 

Order the book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/transient-worlds-on-translating-poetry-arthur-sze/89399417149168d7


More: 
On Translation: U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze and U.K. Poet Laureate Simon Armitage will join the stage for the first time, to discuss their new books: Sze's "Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry" and Armitage's "Gilgamesh: A New Verse Translation." https://www.youtube.com/live/GBvqUNQDXoI?si=aInP54sGGZtiWOjv

The Writer's Voice: Forging One's Own Language

Every writer has a unique voice. By voice, I mean what you say and how you say it. So often, we think that we must follow the standardized rules for writing. This can make the work generic. This is why using A.I. to create work is a mistake. The longer I write and the longer that I teach writing, I understand how important it is to enable a new writer to listen and observe their own tendencies, to note what is unique or new in their writing and to follow this thread.  

Every person has unique perceptions. Each has unique locations, observations, and experiences. This is true even inside the mind. Each has particular landscape, particular encounters and events that happen in the families, in work settings, in relationships and in communities. These perceptions can be explored and developed into the "writer's voice." Partly, it comes about by following one's intuition, one's fascinations, one's tendencies.  In fact, I think this is key to forging one's own voice. 

I found this interview,"Writing is 80% Looking," that speaks so well to the idea of craft and what works in poetry or writing.  I'm not impressed by the interviewer (I hate his commercialization) but I am impressed with Ocean Vuong. He is an amazing poet and writer, and he has some very intriguing insights about the process of creating new writing. He speaks about the writing workshop, and I love how he (later in the video) analyzes the history and evolution of poetry/ news/novels/literature. 

If you are interested, look at this video about the writing workshop, particularly starting at 1:45 through 8:00 minutes. 

https://youtu.be/kn4r4CmWmUw?si=KXGrq0FkMhniqfB9

Another writer who I have long admired is Jhumpa Lahiri. In this discussion published on Lit Hub,  Jhumpa Lahiri and Chiara Barzini discuss writing in another language and"the mother tongue."  Lahiri was Bengali-American and wrote novels in English. But early on, she fell in love with the Italian language. Eventually, she learned Italian, moved to Italy, and began to write in Italian. Now she has returned to the United States, and she has interesting insights into the writing voice, translation, and languages. To read the entire interview go to https://lithub.com/writing-in-the-interim-language-jhumpa-lahiri-and-chiara-barzini-in-conversation/

Jhumpa Lahiri: I’ll cite the French-Guadeloupéenne writer Maryse Condé who felt the conflicting expectations of writing in French and Créole and eventually said: “I write in Maryse Condé.” She liberated herself from the trap of either/or, and also, given that she is francophone, from the oppressive weight of a colonial language. Condé forged a French language of her own, a French she has interrogated, grappled with, and comes to identify with on her own terms. All writers must forge their own language and liberate themselves in this way. This notion of liberating ourselves from another strain of the binary—that which divides and defines what is native and what is foreign—lies behind what Proust says: that beautiful books are written in a sort of foreign language. Ever since I discovered James Joyce and Virginia Woolf I have been seeking my own language.

We can look at our own rough drafts to notice what is new, what is emerging, and embark on an exploration.  Writing is not just looking, but also a doing.  We bring in our curiosity, our languages (diction and lingo as well), and our eccentricities.  The writing voice is meant to be unique.   

Subtext Books: A Reading

I hope you can join us at Subtext Books in St. Paul, Minnesota on May 27th at 7 pm.  The Minnesota authors who contributed to the book, On An Inland Sea: Writing the Great Lakes will read excerpts of their work. 

A Celebration of Transient Worlds by U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze

Apr 20, 2026 07:15 PM. CST- or 5:15 PM PDT. Free to Attend

Join U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze and host Michael Wiegers as we celebrate the publication of Transient Worlds, Arthur Sze's official Laureate project! This virtual reading and conversation will take you inside the pages and purpose of this landmark collection. Receive a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Transient Worlds; travel the inspirational pathways of meaning between a source poem and its translations; and discover how reading and writing translation can be a new entrance into your own creative writing practice.

Register here for Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_IbWHQhffSCWlJA-T8yiIXQ

League of Minnesota Poets: Thawlight

The 2026 conference of the Minnesota League of Poets took place in Ely, Minnesota on April 10 & 11.  The theme is "Thawlight," a word invented by poet Amanda Bailey to signify the change from the winter cold that put our animals in hibernation and our trees on hold. The season is turning toward spring with melting of ice and snow, greening of fields, leaves emerging on the trees, and songbirds returning. It's like dawn, she said. A creative time.  

I hope my keynote address inspires poets to think of ways to tap into the power of changes, like the way a polliwog transforms into a frog or an egg hatches and the bird starts to fly.  I want to acknowledge and borrow the forces of change, the elements, and the mythic stories, folk tales, fairy tales, and creation stories. I want all of our imaginations and music to flourish.  Poetry plays in all the fields of art and thought, and it can change the world.  

Usual and Impossible

 

TIME’S BODY by Brenda Hillman

—in the middle of the beginning they woke you
from a long sleep;

you could see the edges of the world
being formed, the boundaries
space would make in its eagerness
to be included.

The problem time would have
in its need to be the main thing.

The source of life is not life
but rebellion toward meaning.
When you saw the workers were already busy,

that the list you’d been handed
was usual and impossible

And held it all, and thin
or most, your will
strong as a paper clip

you needed a location
from which to act on your assigned nature

so you chose time:
seed of light,
seed of torment—

About poetry, Hillman writes: 

It is impossible to put boundaries on your words, even if you make a poem. Each word is a maze. So, you are full of desire to make a memorable thing and have the form be very dictated by some way that it has to be. But the poem itself is going to undo that intention. It’s almost like you’re knitting a sweater and something is unraveling it on the other end. – Brenda Hillman

Inspirations: Composing Myself

I write about rivers. My work reflects my landscape, but I would not call my work "nature writing." Instead I am taken by the forces in the landscape, and I find that these propel my poetry. 

This video featuring Anna Thorvaldsdottir, composer, expresses the same impulse. She says this about her inspiration: "sometimes it's the balances and the structural forces and the opposites in nature...."

 

I found a wonderful recording: the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra performing "Before We Fall," a new composition from Ann Thorvaldsdottir. Amazing.  It's just the kind of music I love to listen to while writing.... centered on the cello (it was created for the cellist Johannes Moser), instrumental, and rich with texture and nuances. The Minnesota Orchestra will perform this piece in January 2027. I'm definitely going to be there.

The link below is a video of the performance of "Before We Fall" that premiered at Musikkitalo in Helsinki, Finland. You will glimpse the twisted shape of the organ pipes in this video -- they look like a tangle of branches from a large tree. The organ is not played, but the image of silvery tree limbs speaks of Nordic landscapes.  

Before We Fall:   

https://vimeo.com/1156421110

This feature video of Thorvaldsdottir is available through the Wise Music Group, representing composers and songwriters across the globe.  See more at https://www.youtube.com/@WiseMusicGroup

Ecstatic Poems: Laugh Even When You Lose

Loss is Not Defeat

Poet Coleman Barks passed away recently.  At the University of Georgia English Department, he used to teach literature and creative writing.  A writer of ecstatic poems, he also translated the Sufi poet, Rumi.  The word ecstatic comes from the Greek ekstasis, meaning “to stand outside of oneself.” It is poetry that expresses transcendence or mystical experience.  This was characteristic of the poems written by Barks, as in this excerpt of his poem "Glad."  

In the glory of the gloaming-green soccer
field her team, the Gladiators, is losing

ten to zip. She never loses interest in
the roughhouse one-on-one that comes

every half a minute. She sticks her leg
in danger and comes out the other side running.

...

This poem reflects joy in losing as well as in winning. To read the entire poem by Coleman Barks, go to 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/coleman-barks#tab-poems

Read an excerpt of a  poem by Rumi: 

Your laughter turns the world to paradise.
It tears through me like fire.
It teaches me.
...

Last night, the spirit of dawn came to my room
and gave me a lesson in laughter.
Our blazing roars lit the morning sky.

When I brood like a rain cloud,
laughter flashes through me.
It’s the habit of lightning to laugh through a storm.

Look at the furnace. Look at the stones.
See the glowing red veins?
Gold—laughing in fire, daring you,

“Prove you’re no fake!
Laugh even when you lose.”
...

From Gold (NYRB Classics, 2022) by Rumi. Translated from the Farsi by Haleh Liza Gafori. Copyright © 2022 by Haleh Liza Gafori. 

To read the entire poem and see a lesson plan for teaching this, go to 

poets.org

To read a poem by Coleman Barks, go to 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/coleman-barks#tab-poems

Seared by Memory: Meet the Moment: Writers Speak Out on Feb 26, 2026 at Wussow's Concert Cafe in Duluth, Minnesota

In the Blaney lecture“Not Persuasion, But Transport: The Poetry of Witness” on October 25, 2013, at Poets Forum in New York City. (and archived on Poets.org) Carolyn Forché said,:

I know that poetry begins in a not-knowing rather than a moral impulse. A poet’s consciousness is, in this sense, improvisational and open to transformations, felicitous accidents, and an intuitive response to language-generating meaning and music—that is true whether the spark igniting the poem comes from a word, a phrase, an image, or a moment in experience, present or remembered....

I also know that consciousness can be incised by experience, seared by memory, awakened by what is seen and lived and that the poet’s language also passes through this fire and is marked by it."

I had the pleasure of hosting this event. Thank you to the writers of these great poems & prose featured last week at Meet the Moment. Carter Meland Julie Gard Sara Sowers-Wills Jess Morgan, Anastasia Bamford Ryan Vine Jayson Iwen Liz Minette, Troy Peters, Haley Swann, Patty Fleege, Lexi Clark, Sarah Royer-Stoll, and Claudia Daly. Wussow's Concert Cafe, Zomi Bloom

Here's a sample of songs created in resistance to ICE.

Singing Resistance this winter in Minneapolis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4qXXNnjGHQ

The Streets of Minneapolis: Three Irish Women

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci_0PAObc4A&list=RDCi_0PAObc4A

The Rise of the North

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uozLlmUhzZY

F**k ICE by Scared Ketchup

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PUOhAJG5EU&list=RD4PUOhAJG5EU

Meet the Moment: Writers Speak Out in Duluth, Minnesota