My Pleasure at Meeting an Old Friend from Liangzhou Here on the River Huai Wei Yingwu When I passed through Hanyang, we'd meet, And every time we rolled home drunk. We have drifted, time has flowed; two men parted, ten years passed. Firm the friendship, we've decayed: we laugh to find our temples gray. Stay here and watch the autumn come! The north will wait; no need to run. 韦应物 淮上喜会梁州故人 江汉曾为客,相逢每醉还。 浮云一别后,流水十年间。 欢笑情如旧,萧疏鬓已斑。 何因不归去?淮上有秋山。
Now, I am not always a fan of Wei Yingwu (second half of the 8th century). But this is a genuinely lovely poem, and I’m not sure I’ve really done it justice. Wei meets his old friend (we don’t know who the friend was) after a decade apart, and just seems happy to see him. The heart of this poem is in the middle two couplets, expressing some very conventional emotions in a way that just…fits. Every word is in the right place. The two couplets are in perfect parallel form, with gentle humour worked into the third couplet in particular.
But in English poetry, parallelism just doesn’t sing. So we have to do something else, and I’ve tried to recreate the parallel connections by recombining the lines. I hope it conveys some of the feeling of the source, which is true ease and pleasure.
I’ll tell you what really feels like this poem, to me, though: Hollie McNish
Hear her reading about friendship: Instagram link
And read the poem below:
a poem written one night when i was really really missing some of my friends Hollie McNish my friends are scattered across cities now, across countries and countryside distant as aeroplanes watched from your window at night, wondering where those miniature people strapped in might be going why did we scatter again? were those studies and lovers and money that broke us apart, birds migrating confused by the bright lights of progress, were they worth it? i can’t tell if that light is a star or a wing tip, either way i just wish you were closer either way, i wish you would knock on my door while i’m sleeping, throw a stone at my window and wake me so we can sit on the pavement and talk about nothing and throw balls at the curb and never have left i miss you like believing in fairies and god, like lone sheep in frosts, i am freezing and bored of you not being around, i am so sick of dates in the diary and i keep missing the timing of what’s app chats, catching up on hundreds of lines of typed conversations i am reading alone, fuck this, where have you gone, i want you all here, i want your face not emoji emotions, palpably sobbing or laughing into a tea i can pass from my hand to yours, i want to hear how it sounds when you yawn in the morning, i want the comfort of friends i can talk to about anything, i want you sat on the floor of my bedroom in your favourite pyjamas excitedly laying pillows and cushions and duvets and blankets across the surface of earth in the hope we will be cosy enough
There’s a kind of assured clarity that seems to be shared between these two poems. In both, metaphors divided the friends (“drifting” for Wei, “bright lights of progress” for McNish), and those abstractions now somehow seem paltry in the face of real details like the grey hairs at temples, watching the leaves turn together, or the practicalities of sorting out sleeping arrangements when there aren’t enough beds.
Perhaps I’ll come back to this one some day.
Here’s Cinix with the reading: