Meng Haoran juggles words

There's emotion, but mostly wordplay

To My Old Companions in Guangling, As Night Falls on the Tonglu River
Meng Haoran

The hills grow dim
With glum gibbons' coos
On a gunmetal river
And rushing night flows
A wind whines
In the leaves of two banks
The moon shines
On one lonely sampan
Jiande is loved
But not by me
I recall Guangling
Constantly
I dash off two lines
For delivery
Two lines of tears
To Guangling, to the sea

孟浩然  宿桐庐江寄广陵旧游
山暝听猿愁，沧江急夜流。
风鸣两岸叶，月照一孤舟。
建德非吾土，维扬忆旧游。
还将两行泪，遥寄海西头。

---

Meng is playing with names, playing with conventions, playing with references… All the individual parts of this poem are rather stylish. As a whole, I think it falls a bit flat, because there’s no emotional core, but each of the individual parts is a real pleasure.

We start, as so often, on a river at dusk. It’s the time of sadness and reflection, and Meng leans into this with grammatical ambiguity. I reproduced this with “glum gibbons’ coos” and “rushing night flows.” The ambiguity doesn’t pop out quite as well in English as in the source, but the goal is to leave the reader convinced that the glumness is in the gibbons and in the calls and in the poet; that the flows are rushing and the night is rushing. The image is indefinite, but the feeling is clear either way.

Similarly, the wind and the moonlight are both pervasive and localised. By narrowing in from two banks to one single sampan, Meng turns the moonlight into a spotlight that picks out his loneliness in a sea of loneliness.

“Loved but not by me” is a quote from a poet 500 years before. Next he begins playing with different historical names for Guangling, which I could not find a way to translate. The first old name sounds like “only,” so the line suggests he is spending his time doing nothing but recalling his friends back in Guangling. The second old name includes the word for sea, which allows him to build on the “lines of tears” wordplay. His two lines of tears are both the tear-splashed poetry in this letter, and trails of tears dripped into the water. His tears will be washed downstream to the sea; his letter will be delivered upstream to Guangling.

All of this wordplay delivers a lovely feel, line by line. At the end of the poem, I’m not sure it’s added up to much. But it’s a pleasure to read.