Wei Ying-wu (737–791) was born during the T’ang dynasty. A poet whose legacy is centered in the natural world, he intentionally countered the literary establishment of his time. Before being translated in Red Pine’s In Such Hard Times, few pieces were available in English.
Red Pine (Bill Porter), a translator of Chinese texts, primarily Taoist and Buddhist, spent four years in a Buddhist monastery in Taiwan. Among his many translated works are If a Mountain Lion Could Sing: The Lyric Poems of Xin Qiju (Copper Canyon Press, 2025), Lao-Tze’s Taoteching, and In Such Hard Times: The Poetry of Wei Ying-wu. He lives in Washington with his family.