1:00 pm, Red Cap Room
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In Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry Arthur 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 possibilities of translation. Using multiple translations of the same source poems—as well as original poems written by translators— Sze explores deep connections between writing and reading, and invites readers to consider their own engagements with reading as a creative pursuit, giving them tools to translate poems and unlock foreign-language works as inspirational sources. At its core, this unique anthology, published by Copper Canyon Press in association with the Library of Congress, showcases a profound goal of global literary citizenship: to open literature to all readers and encourage poetic creativity at the fundamental level of language itself.
Arthur Sze is the twenty-fifth Poet Laureate of the United States and the author of twelve books of poetry, including The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems, selected for a 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature Prize; Sight Lines, for which he received the National Book Award; Compass Rose, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and The Ginkgo Light, selected for the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Book Award. He has also published The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry and The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems.
A recipient of the 2025 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry for Lifetime Achievement, 2024 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature Prize, 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, Sze was 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, he 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.
