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Meng Jiao (Wade-Giles name: Meng Chiao) | |
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MENG JIAO (MENG CHIAO) (751-814) Meng Jiao came from Huzhou-Wukang (present-day Deqing County, Zhejiang province) and was the oldest and among the best of the circle of writers who gathered around the great prose master Han Yu in the last decade of the eighth century. He met Han Yu in Changan in 791, but though Han Yu passed the Imperial Examinations in 792, Meng Jiao failed, as he did again in 793. He finally passed in 796 but did not receive a position for four years, and even then it was a humiliatingly insignificant post in the provinces. He even lost this post within a few years and settled in Luoyang, where he lived for the rest of his life dependent on patrons and friends. His personal life was one of tragedy and loss: his three sons died young, and he lost his wife as well. Around five hundred of his poems survive, most of them in the "old style" form of poetry (gu shi). Though Meng Jiao was popular enough in his own time, his reputation went into a tailspin some centuries after his death, because of his brash, disturbing, and jarring verse, which seemed to lack grace and decorum. In fact, it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that his verse has inspired not so much neglect as active hatred, even in such distinguished readers as Su Shi, who states baldly in his two poems "On Reading Meng Jiao's Poetry" that "[he] hate[s] Meng Jiao's poems," which sound to him like a "cold cicada wail": My first impression is of eating little fishes-- What you get's not worth the trouble; Or of boiling tiny mud crabs And ending up with some empty claws. (tr. Burton Watson) There is no doubt that Su Shi is a master of the literary put down, and, after all, a number of Meng Jiao's poems do come across as shrill, self obsessed, and self pitying --yet in this lies much of his interest. The great Song dynasty politician and poet Ouyang Xiu admired Meng Jiao's poetry precisely because he was a "poor poet...who liked to write lines reflecting his hard life." Ouyang writes admiringly: "Meng has a poem on moving house: I borrow a wagon to carry my furniture but my goods don't even make one load. He is saying that he's so poor he hasn't anything to move. He has another poem to express his gratitude to people who have given him some charcoal. The heat makes my crooked body straight. People say one cannot write lines like this without actually experiencing such suffering." The glaze of decorous objectivity that is so beautiful in much of Chinese poetry is scraped off in Meng Jiao's poems, revealing a didactic would be Confucian moralist who ends up writing startling, ghostly, and elegiac poems about his own sorrows and idiosyncrasies, happy to portray himself as despised and sick with illness and self doubt. If it seems strange to celebrate so fallible a figure, consider his own words: "these sour moans / are also finished verse." ___________________ Song of a Traveling Son ---Translated by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping ___________________ Song of Fidelity ---Translated by
Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping Departure in Ancient Times ---Translated by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping
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