A Thousand Words


Dear Eugene,

On our bus ride back from church camp this weekend, someone led us down memory lane to sing along to a well known Cantonese TV show theme song.  Part of it goes this way:

愛你恨你　
問君知否
似大江一發不收

轉千灣
轉千灘
亦未平復此中爭鬥

It is a memory that I don't have because when I was a child I didn't watch TV and the show was before my time anyway.  That I actually know this song speaks about its speaking power.  Let me try to translate--or, more like, paraphrase, like what you did with the Bible.

Love you, hate you
I don't know which
Do you know any?
A torrent once unleashed turns no tail

 Bent a thousand times
Wended to a thousand shores
No score settled
The deluge rages on

I don't think I am doing a good job and maybe no one ever can.  There are a thousand words for hate in the Chinese language and this one as I see it cuts like a little knife to inflict on a thin space and you might die from it eventually but not quite yet cos that would be too easy.

I think this is all I can write this morning.  The poetry exhausted me.  To not bastardize a language that adamantly resists abstraction exhausted me.  It takes every grain of moral fiber in us to resist whoring our way through life.

The deluge rages on.

Yours, Alex

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