Here is a translation from Bill Porter/Red Pine:

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You ask when I’ll return but when doesn’t have a date

the rain tonight in the hills of Pa floods the autumn lakes

when will we trim candlewicks by the west window again

and talk about when it rained in the hills of Pa this night.

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Bill Porter/Red Pine, Finding Them Gone: Visiting China’s Poets of the Past (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press 20216) 81.

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Here is a translation by Chloe Garcia Graham in

in Chloe Garcia Graham, ed.,  Li Shangyin (New York: New York Review Books, 2018) 11.

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You ask the date of my return.

No date is set.

The autumn pools on Ba Mountain

Welling with the night rain.

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How will that moment ever be: Together,

Trimming a candle at the west window,

And me, recounting

This rainy spell on Ba Mountain?

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Id., page 114 translation by Lucas Klein:

You ask when I’ll be back but there is no when.
In the hills night rains are flooding autumn pools.

When will we sit and trim the wicks in the west window

and talk about the hills and night and rain?

Id., page 141 translation by A.C. Graham:

You ask how long before I come.  Still no date is set.

The night rains on Mount Pa swell the autumn pool.

When shall we, side by side, trim a candle at the West window,
And talk back to the times of night rain on Mount Pa?

Li Shangyin (813-859) wrote many poems that are as elusive as they are beautiful. His images and allusions enchant, but are often difficult to pin to any literal  narrative.  (As a pop music comparison, perhaps, I think of the swirling stream-of-consciousness images in some early Bob Dylan songs.)  Night Rain Sent North is unusual for a Li poem: alluring and evocative, but easy to associate with a specific situation and sentiment.

Li wrote the poem while posted to a town in Szechuan province as secretary to an official working on military affairs. He spent four years there, far from the dynastic capital in Chang‘an. In this poem, he wonders when he will see his correspondent again and imagines that future reunion. 

Many English translations sound as if the poet is writing to a distant lover, or perhaps an intimate friend. I like to imagine that he was writing to his dear wife who remained in Chang’an. Scholars, though, believe that his wife died before he left the capital. Bill Porter, Finding Them Gone p.81; Stephen Owen, The Late Tang: Chinese Poetry in the Mid-Ninth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2006) 351-52.  So we don't know the intended recipient. In my imagination, a separation by both distance and death would make a poem addressed to Li's wife all the more poignant.  

One website splashes cold water on any romantic interpretation. To that writer, the Chinese character that begins the poem suggests that Li is writing to his boss! 

Li’s poem envisions trimming a candle together again (presumably to keep the flame burning for a long conversation after sunset). A mundane interpretation (the boss character) would bring to mind Li anticipating an all-nighter while he reports to his manager.  What a let down.  I much prefer to think of Li looking forward to pillow talk with a wife he hasn’t seen in years.  

So I will keep reaching for a romantic interpretation. Li is known as “among the few major writers in the classical literature of China for whom the pains of love and the beauty of women are entirely serious themes.” Cyril Birch, ed., Anthology of Chinese Literature: From Early Times to the Fourteenth Century (New York: Grove Press 1965) at p. 323.

I find it difficult sometimes to suss out the romantic from the amicable from the sycophantic in Chinese poetry. A poet sometimes writes to a male friend in a very tender way.  Moreover, there are works in which a shunned scholar addresses his dismissive boss with the wistful sighs of a spurned lover.  (Going back to the ancient Book of Songs, it seems there was a convention of addressing a revered leader as if one were a suitor.)  Yet in the Tang lovers clearly exchanged romantic verse.  See the fictional examples recounted in Yuan Chen’s The Story of  Ts’ui Ying Ying, in Birch, op cit., 290-99.  

I wonder to what extent some of the “I sigh for my Lord” type poetry may indeed be romantic, not in a homoerotic sense (though who knows?) but in a sense that is to me a more interesting conjecture (and it is purely that, my halting conjecture): Perhaps it was accepted enough as a trope to write this kind of poetry ‘to’ your boss that it served as an acceptable, veiled way to convey actual romantic sentiments to your lover. Think in the Biblical tradition of the Song of Solomon, which one can read either as a metaphor of religious devotion, or as just what it appears to be on the surface: steamy romantic poetry.

My song: It is my imagination that inserts “wedding candles” into this song. Candles feature in a traditional Chinese wedding (Dragon and Phoenix candles).  My image hints that the reunion seems a renewal of vows, or perhaps reclaims the thrill of the first wedding night. This may have no true relation to Li or to Chinese culture, but it appeals to me as a poetic image.

Musical inspiration:  I had in mind languid love songs like Ray Price’s Soft Rain (lovers part in a soft rain, and their ‘perfect love’ becomes just the singer’s memory). Price recorded Soft Rain several times, beginning with a 1961 version that hit #3 on the country charts.  The early version and some later ones retain a bit of barroom bounce. (I don’t care for 1967's “countrypolitan” version with orchestration and heavy female ooh-ooh backing chorus, which IMHO drags and sinks too far into the maudlin.) Bobby Flores and Justin Trevino have recorded nice covers. 

Sometimes when I listen to my melody I hear a bit of Home on the Range.