比尔·波特 Bill Porter (1943年)

比尔·波特于 1943 年 10 月 3 日出生在加利福尼亚州范内斯，并在爱达荷州北部长大，他的父母于 1954 年搬到了那里。由于他的父亲经常出差，波特在洛杉矶和旧金山湾区上寄宿学校，并于 1961 年从高中毕业。在服兵役（1964-1967 年）之后，他进入加州大学圣芭芭拉分校，主修人类学。1970 年，他进入哥伦比亚大学研究生院，师从玛格丽特·米德（Margaret Mead）和鲁思·本尼迪克特（Ruth Benedict）等教授学习人类学。当他住在纽约时，他对佛教产生了兴趣，并于 1972 年离开美国，搬到了台湾的一个佛教寺庙。在与僧侣和尼姑一起生活了三年多之后，他自立门户，通过教英语养活自己，后来在台湾和香港的英语电台担任记者。在此期间，他与一位中国女子结婚，育有两个孩子，并开始翻译中国诗歌和佛教经文。1993年，他回到美国，以便让子女学习英语，此后一直居住在华盛顿州的汤森德港。过去二十年来，他作为一名独立学者工作，依靠书籍版税和演讲费养活自己。他在美国各地的几十个禅宗中心讲授过禅宗，并在美国、英国和德国的许多主要大学讲授过中国历史、文化、宗教和诗歌，他翻译的与这些主题有关的作品获得了多个奖项，包括两个国家艺术基金翻译奖、一个笔会翻译奖、美国文学翻译家协会首届亚洲文学奖，最近还获得了古根海姆奖学金，以支持他完成《寻人不遇》的翻译工作。其翻译作品采用“赤松”（red pine）为笔名。2023年，以比尔·波特为主角的纪录片《与古人舞》（又名《与死人舞》Dancing with the dead）发布。Bill Porter was born in Van Nuys, California, on October 3, 1943, and grew up in northern Idaho, where his parents moved in 1954. Since his father was often away on business, Porter attended boarding schools in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, where he graduated from high school in 1961. After a tour of duty in the US Army (1964–67), he attended 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 living in New York, he became interested in Buddhism, and in 1972 he left America and moved to a Buddhist monastery in Taiwan. After more than 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 so that his children could learn English, and he has lived ever since in Port Townsend, Washington. For the past twenty years, he has worked as an independent scholar and has supported himself from book royalties and speaking fees. He has given talks on Zen at dozens of Zen centers throughout the United States and has lectured on Chinese history, culture, religion, and poetry at many of the major universities in the United States, England, and Germany. His translations of texts related to these subjects have been honored with a number of awards, including two NEA translation fellowships, a PEN translation award, the inaugural Asian Literature Award of the American Literary Translators Association, and more recently a Guggenheim Fellowship, which he received to support work on the book Finding them gone.