Transient Worlds: on Translating Poetry

Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry is a personal guide to global poetry in translation by 25 th U.S. 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. To do this, Sze engages multiple translations of the same source poems-as well as original poems written by translators-toexplore deep connections between the acts of writing and reading. In Zone 10, for instance, Sze presents two translations of a single poem by Marina Tsevataeva, the first a well-known standard by Elaine Feinstein, and the second by Carol Moldaw, who employed a Russian-speaking friend to help translate the poem phrase by phrase.