We’ll look at "Zone One" from Sze’s anthology exploring global poetry in translation, Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry, where a crib (a literal, character-by-character translation or gloss), along with three different translations of Chinese poet Tao Qian’s “Drinking Wine (V)" are presented. Knowledge of Chinese is not necessary, nor is having read Transient Worlds. We’ll discuss issues of translation and make our own translations of this poem. We’ll then discuss what we might use to expand and strengthen our own poetry and write a poem that is made by “writing through” the translation.
Books will be available for purchase on site.
For more, check out Cristoso Apache + Arthur Sze: In Conversation at Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design on Tuesday, January 12.
Arthur Sze is a poet, translator, and editor, and in 2025 he was named the 25th Poet Laureate of the United States. He is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Into the Hush (2025) and The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems (2025); The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2021); Sight Lines (2019), for which he won the National Book Award; Compass Rose (2014); The Ginkgo Light (2009); Quipu (2005); The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998 (1998); and Archipelago (1995). He also authored Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry (forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press, 2026), The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry (2024), and edited Chinese Writers on Writing (2010). His poetry has been translated into fifteen languages, including Chinese, Dutch, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. Sze received the 2025 Bollingen Prize for lifetime achievement in American poetry, the 2024 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Jackson Poetry Prize, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among others. 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. Professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), Sze was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, where he lives with his wife, the poet Carol Moldaw.
