Meng Haoran

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Meng Haoran

Meng Haoran ( Chinese  孟浩然 , Pinyin Mèng Hàorán , W.-G. Meng Hao-jan ; * 689 or 691 ; † 740 ) was a Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty , who is often mentioned together with the poet Wang Wei , with the he was friends.

Life

Meng Haoran was born into a landowning family in Xiangyang, Hubei Province , and spent much of his life in the family home to which he was very attached. Many of his poems are about the landscapes, legends and history of this area.

Meng's political career was unsuccessful. He did not pass the Jinshi exam until he was 39 and was given his only official post three years before his death, but gave it up after a year.

plant

Meng is considered to be one of the first fully valid representatives of the style of the Tang heyday. In addition to Gushi , that is, poems in the old style, he also wrote Jintishi , poems in the modern style. Meng Haoran's poetry was popular among officials in the capital, and 15 of his total of 218 poems were included in the Three Hundred Tang Poems . In addition to the 218 poems, a few stanzas have come down to us.

One of his most famous poems is the five-syllable quatrain spring twilight ( 春曉 , Chūnxiǎo ).

Original with pinyin inscription and word-for-word translation:

春眠不覺曉 ， Chūn mián bù jué xiǎo, (spring - sleep - not - notice - dawn)
處處 聞 啼鳥。 Chùchù wén tí niǎo. (everywhere - hear - call - birds)
夜來 風雨聲 ， Yè lái fēngyǔshēng, (night - come - wind-rain-sound)
花落 知多少。 Huā luò zhī duōshǎo. (Flowers - fall - know - how many?)

Literary translation:

Spring dawn
In the spring I slept, not knowing the morning.
Birds were already singing their songs.
Wind and rain rustled in the night.
Have many flowers fallen off?
(after Ambros Rust)

Work editions

  • The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-jan . transl. by David Hinton. Archipelagos Books, New York 2004, ISBN 0-9728692-3-9

literature

  • Daniel Joseph Bryant: The high T'ang poet Meng Hao-jan: studies in biography and textual history . University of British Columbia, Vancouver 1977 (English, digitized, 25MB - also contains English translations of all of the poet's known poems).
  • Paul W. Kroll: Meng Hao-jan . Twayne, Boston 1981, ISBN 0-8057-6470-4
  • Volker Klöpsch, Eva Müller (ed.): Lexicon of Chinese Literature. Munich: C. Beck, 2007. ISBN 978-3-40652214-7
  • Yan Zhao, Dieter Ziethen: I quietly hear blossoms fall - poems from the Chinese classical period . Hefei Huang Verlag, Groebenzell 2009, ISBN 978-3-940497-24-6
  • Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer: History of Chinese literature. From the beginning to the present. Beck, Munich 1999, ISBN 978-3-406-45337-3

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 春晓 in the Chinese-language Wikisource
  2. ↑ Ambros Rust: Spring Dawn. His life and religious thinking based on his poems. Dissertation Zurich 1959. In: www.haikuscope.de. HAIKUSCOPE Represented by: Gerd Börner, Michael Denhoff, Hubertus Thum, p. 65 , accessed on June 18, 2019 .
Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Chinese. Meng is the family name here, Haoran is the first name.
personal data
SURNAME Meng Haoran
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty
DATE OF BIRTH 689 or 691
DATE OF DEATH 740