Wang Wei bumps into an old friend and offers him wine. But his friend isn’t drinking…
送別
下馬飲君酒， 問君何所之？
君言不得意， 歸臥南山陲。
但去莫復問， 白雲無盡時。
The Send-off
I dismounted to offer you wine
asked where you were going
you said you were unfulfilled
retiring to southern mountain borderlands
then you left no one asks after you now
white clouds endless in that moment
Translation notes
In the Tang dynasty, many intellectuals were employed as officials by the government. They would often be sent around the country to collect taxes and perform administrative duties. We know that Wang Wei was an official and politician at many points throughout his life. Naturally, as highly educated scholars, officials such as Wang Wei would also write poems.
Because a lot of Tang dynasty poetry is so good, it’s sometimes easy to forget that the poetry was often secondary to a career that involved moving around and engaging in the cut-and-thrust world of politics. In this poem, Wang Wei encounters someone who has played the game and lost. As is customary, his friend is heading south into seclusion, never to be seen again. The idea of retreating to seclusion in the southern mountains is as old as Chinese poetry itself, and echoes Drinking Wine No. 5 by Tao Yuanming 陶渊明.
This all provides important context for the translation. As for the title, many translators choose ‘farewell’. I think ‘farewell’ slightly misses the point - there’s something more here that justifies this being called a send-off.
The final two lines of the poem provide a challenge because the structure of the lines in Chinese is similar but the characters are not easily translatable. Fu 復 usually means ‘again’ but can also imply returning to a previous state. So the three characters mo fu wen 莫復問 translate to something like ‘in no case will you return to a state where anyone asks after you’. I’ve rendered this line in the present tense and added ‘now’ to imply a change of state from how things used to be. I feel this fits the final line of the poem, where shi 時 implies a specific moment or timeliness of the never-ending white clouds. To bring all this together, I completely removed all punctuation in the English translation to allow the passing of time to be felt as subtly as it is written in the original text.