PORT TOWNSEND — Author and translator Bill Porter will address Studium Generale Port Townsend at 4 p.m. Thursday.
The free speaker series, sponsored by Peninsula College, Centrum and Fort Worden Hospitality, is at the Commons on Fort Worden, 210 Battery Way.
Porter, under the pseudonym of Red Pine, is a Port Townsend-based translator of Ancient Chinese poetic and religious texts.
His translations have been honored with a number of awards, including two National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowships, a PEN Translation Prize and the inaugural Asian Literature Award of the American Literary Translators Association.
The Red Pine book “Finding Them Gone” is based on a pilgrimage to the graves and homes of China’s greatest poets.
More recently, Porter received the 2018 Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation bestowed by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
His new anthology, “Dancing with the Dead: The Essential Red Pine,” gathers more than 30 voices from the ancient Chinese past such as Buddhist poets Cold Mountain (Hanshan) and Stonehouse (Shiwu) as well as Tang-dynasty luminaries Wei Yingwu and Liu Zongyuan.
