Poet Lee in translation

Following is a translation of a poem I discovered recently. The poem was originally in Chinese and was translated by Bruce Lee (Yes, the same. Do you know of another?)

It was intense to learn that Bruce Lee was an accomplished poet who not only wrote his own work but translated the works of others.


In fact, the article I read of this (and the poem) continued that "He was a man who took poetry so seriously that he even wrote an entire movie script (with the aid of Sterling Silliphant, the screenwriter of the Oscar winning In the Heat of the Night) based off of a poem that he composed."

But I digress...

[If you want to read about Bruce Lee and his poetic side outside his poetry in motion, click to read: Poetry Kung Fu or: Breaking Boards With Your Head is Dumb, Write Poems Instead.]

The poem that Lee translated was that of Kuan, the wife of great Yuan painter Chao Mengfu. She wrote the upon hearing her husband was to take a mistress.

*

Parting
By Madame Kuan, translated by Bruce Lee

Who knows when meeting shall ever be.
If might be for years or
It might be forever.

Let us then take a lump of clay,
Wet it, pat it,
And make an image of you
And an image of me.
Then smash them, crash them,
And, with a little water,
Knead them together.

And out of the clay we’ll remake
An image of you, and an image of me.
Thus in my clay, there’s a little of you,
And in your clay, there’s a little of me.
And nothing will ever set us apart.

Living, we’ll be forever in each other’s heart,
and dead, we’ll be buried together.

*

Chao Mengfu didn’t take the mistress.

The imagery in my mind was beyond surreal and blew my mind in the power of the word strings. Once again I am humbled and wish that I could write things that way... and I speak not only of the tempo but the translation itself.

So I thought it apt to share, considering that is the real essence of my blog... to reveal things that have impacted (and continue to impact) my development and make me ME.

Care to share any insightful and overwhelming lines of verse that might have blown your mind away?