Sieburth is an authority on French renaissance poetry, European romanticism and literary modernism in general, particularly on the life and work of Ezra Pound.
In addition to his numerous editions of the works of Pound for New Directions and the Library of America, he has published translations of Nostradamus, Maurice Scève, Louise Labé, Friedrich Hölderlin, Georg Büchner, Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Henri Michaux, Antonin Artaud, Michel Leiris, Eugène Guillevic, and Jacques Darras.
He has also published translations into French of American poets such as Michael Palmer.
[1] Sieburth is recognized as a leading translator from both German and French, including the following: Sieburth was made a Chevalier dans l’ordre des palmes académiques in 1985, elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007, and received an Annual Award in Letters from the American Academy of Arts in Letters in 2017, while his forthcoming Late Baudelaire (Yale UP, 2020) has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship for Translation.
Most recently, his A Certain Plume (Michaux) received the 2019 PEN Prize for Poetry in Translation and his Songs from a Single Eye was longlisted for the 2020 PEN Prize for Poetry in Translation.