Meng Haoran

Meng Haoran (in Chinese 孟浩然, sometimes transcribed Mong-Kao-Jen or Mong-Kao-ren) (689 or 691 - 740) Chinese writer is a . It is one of the rare Tang poets who refused an official career; its poetry has as an essential subject nature.

Here how the Marquis D' Hervey de Saint-Denys describes it in his translation of the poetry of Tang:

Meng Haoran comes quite naturally following Wang Wei, which was his/her friend of childhood, his co-religionist and his guard. It had been born in Siang-yang, like Of Fu, at the beginning of the 8th century, and one of the types characteristic of the Chinese well-read man, that offers to us which does not foresee of another alternative, in this life, which to arrive at the honors by the high literary ranks, or to give up itself, in the mountains, with the charms of the daydream and the inaction.

He studied until the forty years age, endeavouring to acquire this major scholarship, the gold key of all the ambitious dreams, and took successively the ranks of graduate, then of bachelor; but having failed the doctorate proof, which it had gone to undergo with the capital of its province, it solved to regain the quiet mountains where its hard youth had run out, to rest there from now on of any work and any concern.

The worship of poetry belonged to the pleasures which Meng Haoran during this new phase of its existence was to taste. Its worms acquired of the celebrity, and the political events inspired some to him by satirists, whose repercussion failed to attract on him all the anger of the emperor.

Wang Wei, then very in favor, diverted the storm and could even obtain small mandarinat of a honourable row for his/her imprudent friend; but the recluse of the Nan-chan mount had given up any fashionable ambition consequently; he did not want to leave his retirement, where he reached a advanced age.

One of its poems is particularly known:

“The light of the spring morning awakes the sleeper,
Of everywhere he intends to resound the songs of birds,
But with the rain and the wind of this nuit
How much flowers now sleep with ground? ”

The topics and images are typical Chinese poetry, but the heart and the human destiny are universal, also meet at Apollinaire:

“Petals fallen from the cherry trees of mai
Are as the nails of that which I have so much aimé
The faded petals are like its eyelids”

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