his writing overtook his academic interest in sci-
ence. Moving West, Sze graduated as a member of
Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California,
Berkeley, where he majored in creative writing.
At Berkeley he immersed himself in Chinese lan-
guage and literature and in such great T’ang-dy-
nasty poets as Li Po, Tu Fu, and Wang Wei, feeling
that through careful study he could best develop
his own voice as a poet. Sze, however, insists he
writes for neither an Asian nor an American aes-
thetic. Instead, he writes within and across the
spaces of various cultures, discourses, and histo-
ries. His poetry incorporates his Chinese heritage,
language, literature, and philosophies, but, rather
than simply reproduce that heritage, Sze medi-
ates it with his relationships to science and Native
American culture.
To date, Sze has authored several volumes of
poetry, including Archipelago, winner of the 1996
American Book Award in Poetry, The Redshifting
Web: Poems 1970–1998, a finalist for the 1999 Le-
nore Marshall Poetry Prize, and The Silk Dragon:
Translations from the Chinese, winner of the West-
ern States Book Award in Translation. His poems
have also appeared in numerous magazines, in-
cluding American Poetry Review, The Paris Review,
Mother Jones, Conjunctions, and Bloomsbury Review.
Translations of Sze’s work have been published in
Italy and China. He has been honored with numer-
ous awards including a Lannan Literary Award for
Poetry, three Witter Bynner Foundation Poetry
Fellowships and two Creative Writing Fellowships
from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Sze’s poetry largely derives from the associations
he finds among classical Chinese poetry, quantum
physics, the uniqueness of a very American land-
scape, and his immersion in Pueblo traditions. A
speaker of Mandarin, Sze began translating poems
in college and has worked at this craft at various
times throughout his career. It was not until the
publication of The Silk Dragon (2004), however,
that Sze brought together the works that have in-
fluenced his own poetry. Although he acknowl-
edges that any translation betrays its original in
some way, Sze works methodically to capture not
only the meaning and dynamic vision of the work
he translates but also its rhythmical flexibility,
which varies dramatically from the stress patterns
in English. He starts a translation by writing out
the Chinese characters as the sounds and tones for
a word, phrase, or cluster of words so he can sense
the inner motion of the poem. He then revises the
overall poem, changing initial translations to oth-
ers that better fit the poem’s context. By working
carefully with the Chinese tones, Sze tries to cap-
ture not only the original poem’s cadences but also
its silences. The translation, like Sze’s own poems,
becomes a work of art that avoids teaching lessons
or drawing conclusions.
Sze finds he enriches rather than complicates
his poetry with a subtlety and emotional power
that he draws from translating Chinese writers—
classical to contemporary. From Asian poetry, Sze
draws themes of oneness and multiplicity and pre-
cise imagery into the juxtaposed architecture of
his writing. To this background he adds Buddhist
and Native American art and culture, as well as his
study of the French symbolists, Rimbaud, Yeats,
and others. The union of past and present, the ex-
otic with the everyday, and physics with lyricism
creates a vivid, surrealist imagery that can surprise
Sze’s readers: Radios in Antarctica send messages
to outer space; legislators vote by raising their feet,
and Zen monks carry fax machines. Sze succinctly
describes his method as one in which “you knock
the / gyroscope off the axis of spinning, / so that
one orientation in the world vanishes / and the
others appear infinite” (“The Axis”).
Conventional metaphor, sequential narrative,
and logical connections among ideas do not play
the central roles in Sze’s work that they do in most
Western poetry. Instead, Sze patterns his work with
nonsymbolic imagery, fragmented sentences, mul-
tiple points in time, and collage, turning the reader
into an “absorbing form” (“The Redshifting Web”).
As the poet disappears behind the poem, readers
are caught in a moment in time filled with unlikely
associations. Some may want to believe that “The
ecology of the Galapagos Islands / has nothing to
do with a pair of scissors,” but, in truth, “The world
of the quark has everything to do / with a jaguar
circling in the night” (“The Leaves of a Dream276 Sze, Arthur