Hutcheson Memorial Fund, Interdisciplinary Study of Religions, Asian Studies, Written Arts, the Center for Civic Engagement and the Bard Translation and Translatability Initiative Presents
The Joy and Curse of Translation
Thursday, October 1, 2020
Online Event
3:00 pm – 4:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
3:00 pm – 4:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Bill Porter / Red Pine, Translator
Part of a Series of Talks on Buddhist Currents in American Poetry Join via Zoom https://bard.zoom.us/j/99375628401?pwd=QlNoL1RoRHRYellZOFpma0JRZEJnQT09
Meeting ID: 993 7562 8401 Passcode: 998992
No one ever plans to be a translator, and no artist is more poorly equipped or trained. Nor do translators ever find out exactly what they’re doing—or even how—but, except for the fact that there’s no money it, why would they ever want to stop?
Bill Porter was born in Van Nuys, California on October 3, 1943, and grew up in northern Idaho. After a tour of duty in the US Army in 1964–67, he attended college at UC Santa Barbara and majored in anthropology. In 1970, he entered graduate school at Columbia University and studied anthropology with a faculty that included Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. While he was in New York, he became interested in Buddhism, and in 1972 he left America for a Buddhist monastery in Taiwan. After three years with the monks and nuns, he struck out on his own and supported himself by teaching English and later by working as a journalist at English-language radio stations in Taiwan and Hong Kong. During this time, he married a Chinese woman, with whom he has two children, and began working on translations of Chinese poetry and Buddhist texts. In 1993, he returned to America, and has lived ever since in Port Townsend, Washington. For the past 27 years, he has worked as an independent scholar. His translations, under the name Red Pine, have been honored with two NEA translation fellowships, a PEN translation award, the inaugural Asian Literature Award of the American Literary Translators Association, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and, more recently, the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation, bestowed by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Between December 2019 and June 2020 he published a series of seven chapbooks with Empty Bowl Press in Anacortes, including Cathay Revisited, a present for Ezra Pound’s daughter and granddaughter.
Join via Zoom
Meeting ID: 993 7562 8401 / Passcode: 998992For more information, call 845-758-6822, e-mail [email protected],
or visit https://bard.zoom.us/j/99375628401?pwd=QlNoL1RoRHRYellZOFpma0JRZEJnQT09 .
Time: 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Location: Online Event