PAST EVENT
Author's Luncheon & Book Signing
Janice Brooks, curator of “The Literary Café Utah" presents
“To Live, To Dance, To Translate”
an author’s luncheon, lecture, and book signing featuring
the American writer, translator and Sinologist Bill Porter (AKA Red Pine)
Bill Porter attended UC Santa Barbara, majoring in anthropology, before entering graduate school at Columbia University in 1970. While living in New York he became interested in Buddhism, and in 1972 left America for a Buddhist monastery in Taiwan. He later worked as a journalist at English-language radio stations in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and meanwhile began translating Chinese poetry and Buddhist texts. In 1993 he relocated to Washington state and began lecturing regularly at universities in the US, England and Germany on Chinese history, culture, poetry and religion.
Porter (AKA Red Pine) is a noted translator of numerous Taoist and Buddhist poems and sūtras. Among his works are The Diamond Sutra, Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits, and The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain (Han Shan) .
His many translations have been honored by two NEA translation fellowships, a PEN translation award, the inaugural Asian Literature Award of the American Literary Translators Association, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
