Christopher Kelen

After Meng Jiao: Responses to the Tang Poet Christopher Kelen

The poems in this book are not translations, rather they may be considered as variations on and responses to the poetry of Meng Jiao. Meng Jiao (751-814) was a poet of the late Tang. Unable to pass the examinations that would have given him a respectable official post, Meng lived a life of poverty, but managed to travel in Hubei, Hunan and Guangxi. More than five hundred of his poems survive and these cover a wide range of genres and themes, amongst which particularly feature devotional meditations, rustic and mountain landscapes and various kinds of lamentation. The poems in this book are written in response to translations of the extant oeuvre of Meng Jiao (made by the author with Amy Wong and Hilda Tam).