The woods are lovely, dark and deep

Yesterday at around 4:00 p.m. I was teaching English vocabulary to some junior high students when this example sentence from the vocabulary textbook caught my eye:

"Robert came to see me on a snowy evening." Obviously whoever wrote this sentence was inspired by Robert Frost's famous poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." The combination of the name Robert and the exact phrase "on a snowy evening" can hardly be a coincidence.

Then later that evening my misreading of my own post title led to the post "Dyed White and Vanya Moroz," which prominently features people named Frost -- Jack Frost and the Russian figure of Father Frost. This made me think again of Robert Frost and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." Even though I'm pretty sure I can recite it from memory, I looked the poem up online and read it.

At around 3:00 this afternoon, my wife said there was a really good documentary on TV and she wanted to watch it with me. This is something that very rarely happens, as she understands that I'm not a TV watcher. It was a Taiwanese film called 九槍, about a Vietnamese illegal alien who was shot nine times by Taiwanese police while he was attempting to steal a cop car while naked and high on drugs. The film name could be translated directly as Nine Shots, but for some reason the English name of the film is instead And Miles to Go Before I Sleep -- that is, the repeated final line of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."

Films are often renamed in translation, but that's a very strange choice. The atmosphere and content of the documentary have absolutely nothing in common with Frost's poem except that the shooting takes place in a wooded area. At the very end, just before the credits roll, the final stanza of Frost's poem appears on the screen, in both the original English and a Chinese translation:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

That's a pretty impressive little cluster of syncs, I think. First Robert and "on a snowy evening"; then Frost; and finally "and miles to go before I sleep" -- references to each of the poet's names and to two different parts of his poem -- and all within a 24-hour period.