Arthur Sze brings character to the language and culture of poetry

May 17—Arthur Sze, a National Book Award winner and former Santa Fe poet laureate, sees translating poems as the deepest form of exploring them.

"I learned my craft through translation," he says. "When you want to translate a word from another language into English, you can't just superficially read it. You have to be thinking of the sound, the rhythm, the meaning, the images, what can't be translated, and how to create some kind of faithful rendition into English. You could be accurate word by word, but the translation would be terrible. So you have to think of the poem happening in the original language and how to use contemporary English to create that experience."

Sze will be in his element on the second day of the Santa Fe International Literary Festival, when he conducts a discussion with noted Chinese poet and translator Wang Jiaxin. They'll have plenty to talk about; both credit translation with augmenting their approach as poets. Also, Sze, whose parents were Chinese, is familiar with Wang's native language and has translated some of his work.

"Chinese is a nonlinear language; it's made up of characters that have highly visual components," he says. "I oftentimes write clusters of words under each Chinese character to create a kind of field of energy, and then I start to string words in English together. And whether translating classical Chinese or, in the case of Wang Jiaxin — the three works I translated of his — I have to write out the characters one by one in my own awkward handwriting, because then I'm personalizing it. I'm stepping inside of how those characters were created. That's why I call it the deepest form of reading. It's experiencing the poem at a really deep level."

This year marks Sze's second appearance at the literary festival, but he's no stranger to connecting with audiences from a stage in addition to via his work.

"I've done it often, but I always learn from it," he says of public presentations. "I'm excited to do it in the context of the international literary festival because I have a chance to have a conversation with another poet from another language and culture. That will make this conversation unique."

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On Stage with Arthur Sze and Wang Jiaxin at the Santa Fe International Literary Festival

* 1 p.m. Saturday, May 18

* Santa Fe Community Convention Center, Rooms A/B

Wang has lived on and off in China as his star has risen, and it's not the only location that influences his work, Sze says.

"He's a leading translator of Paul Celan, the German poet, into Chinese," Sze says of the famed wordsmith who survived the Holocaust but died at age 49 in 1970. "So he's multilingual. And I think, living in New York and also in Europe, he has a very international perspective. I've recently translated three of [Wang's] poems for my new book, The Silk Dragon II [Copper Canyon Press, April 2024]."

That's not the only way in which the poets and translators know each other. They've teamed up for presentations previously, including an April appearance in the Distinguished Visiting Writers Series at Arizona State University.

Both Wang and Sze were born in the 1950s and have seen the world of poetry — as well as Indigenous literature in general — evolve over decades.

"When I started teaching at IAIA, there was a more stereotypical expectation of what Native poetry was supposed to address — horses, sunsets, prayers to beauty — and I think those limitations have all dissolved with the new generation of Native poets who write about anything and everything," Sze says.

He has seen opportunities to get published ebb and flow through the decades.

"I'm in my early 70s, and I think each generation needs to create its own distinct voice and style," Sze says. "I think there is a generation of poets writing in their 30s who don't, and shouldn't, sound like poets writing in their 70s. I had the opportunity to mentor a generation of young Native poets who have emerged and flourished. I taught for 22 years at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and when I started, there were very few Native American poets with any recognition; the few who come to mind are Joy Harjo, Leslie Silko, Simon Ortiz, maybe Scott Momaday."

Sze's collections Sight Lines (Copper Canyon Press) and Starlight Behind Daylight (St. Brigid Press) were published in consecutive years — 2019 and 2020 — and he plans to publish a book of poetry called Into the Hush and a book of interviews and essays, The White Orchard, both in 2025. But he insists he's not prolific.

"My new book The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems [Copper Canyon Press] is, I think, 532 pages — but if you realize it's 50 years' worth of writing, that's only about 10 pages a year," he says.

Sze, who has degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of California, Berkeley, was born in New York City to Chinese immigrants. He spent time in California before moving to Santa Fe, a decision he views as a turning point.

"I've met just amazing individuals who have inspired and helped shape my own poetry, and I can't think of another place in the country where that could happen, frankly," he says. "It's not just the landscape — which certainly is powerful and inspiring — but it's the group of amazingly creative individuals here who make Santa Fe such an interesting place."

Sze doesn't know how much more poetry he has in him, joking that he thinks he'll be lucky if he makes it to 80 years old. But he's confident in one constant.

"I'm continuing to evolve," he says. "There's no end to the growth and to the challenge. I can honestly say that I'm as excited about writing now as I was when I started writing 50 years ago, and that's a pretty wonderful place to be."

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About Arthur Sze

Arthur Sze has written 11 poetry books, including The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems; Sight Lines, which won the National Book Award for Poetry; Pulitzer Prize finalist Compass Rose; and The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970 — 1998. He also published a book of Chinese poetry translations, The Silk Dragon, with a sequel on its way.

Sze, who lives in Santa Fe, was the city's first poet laureate and taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He was the chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2012-2017. His work has been translated into 14 languages, including Chinese, Dutch, Korean, and Portuguese.

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About Wang Jiaxin

Wang Jiaxin was born in 1957 in Danjiangkou, Hubei Province. The government sent him to the countryside to perform manual labor after he graduated high school. On the heels of China's Cultural Revolution , he began attending Wuhan University in 1978 and later worked as a teacher and an editor. He went to London as a visiting scholar in 2002, returning to China two years later.

Wang began writing poetry while in college and gained more attention in the 1990s, after moving to Beijing, about 670 miles northeast of his birthplace. He's famed for works including Pasternak, Eulogy, and London Notes — long narrative poems inspired in part by his "literary relatives" in Russia and England.