You ask me when I am coming. I do not know.
I dream of your mountains and autumn pools brimming all night with the rain.
Oh, when shall we be trimming wicks again, together in your western window?
When shall I be hearing your voice again, all night in the rain?
Original Poem:
「夜雨寄北」
李商隐
君问归期未有期，巴山夜雨涨秋池。
何当共剪西窗烛，却话巴山夜雨时。
Interpretation:
In 848 A.D., Li Shangyin stayed in Sichuan and wrote this popular poem, which he sent to his wife in the north, expressing his homesickness.
Because it is located in the Sichuan Basin, surrounded by mountains on all sides, the Bayu area more night rain, Bashan night rain is a unique landscape of Chongqing in autumn, often clear skies during the day, the night pattering rain on schedule, washed away the day’s dust, summer, the next day is a fresh and cool morning. All the music is silent when dancing in the night sky of Bashan rain, touching the heart of countless sentimental, but also evoke the wandering outside the wanderer how much homesickness sadness. The poet seized the characteristics of the local scenery, to the fine and dense autumn rain rises in the autumn pond to give people the feeling, to express the detained travelling bleak loneliness.
The poet’s thoughts flow between reality-imagination-imagined reality, back and forth, twists and turns, rather like a stream of consciousness; the language of the poem is simple and concise, with a white description of the narrative, landscape, lyricism, scenario blending, the real and the imaginary, falling and falling; the mood is simple and concise. The language of the poem is simple and concise, with narrative and lyricism in the form of white descriptions, blending scenes, mixing reality with reality, and having a good sense of ups and downs; the creation of the mood is natural and beautiful, and the “Night Rain on Bashan Mountain” combines the remoteness of the mountain, the serenity of the night, the lingering rain, and the long taste of lovesickness.
Poem translator:
Kiang Kanghu
About the poet:
Li Shangyin (李商隐), 813-858 AD, was a great poet of the late Tang Dynasty. His poems were on a par with those of Du Mu, and he was known as “Little Li Du”. Li Shangyin was a native of Qinyang, Jiaozuo City, Henan Province. When he was a teenager, he lost his father at the age of nine, and was called “Zheshui East and West, half a century of wandering”.
