友よ水になれ tomo yo mizu ni nare Be Water My Friend
友よ水になれ (tomo yo mizu ni nare), friend, become water, is Bruce Lee's be water, my friend in Japanese: a line Lee wrote for the television series Longstreet in 1971, not the interview the tradition remembers. The Japanese puts the vocative first and the imperative last.
Abstract
友よ水になれ, friend, become water, renders Bruce Lee's be water, my friend, a line he wrote for his role in the television series Longstreet in 1971 and recited in the passage the 2000 documentary Bruce Lee: A Warrior's Journey preserves. The Japanese is in no book to 1946 in the National Diet Library and not in the Japanese encyclopedia's article on Lee; it puts the vocative first and the imperative last.
Overview
The sense. An imperative with a vocative: be water, my friend, in Japanese that has no Japanese page behind it.
The words. The words are ordinary. 水になれ is the imperative of なる, become; 友よ is the vocative, put first where English puts my friend last. The English and the Japanese overlap fully in sense; the difference is of address: Japanese puts the vocative first and the verb last.
The text in English. The English is Lee's line.
The historical record
1971 and 2000. Be water, my friend. Wikiquote gives the passage whole, from empty your mind to be water, my friend, and sources it to the 2000 documentary Bruce Lee: A Warrior's Journey, with the note that Lee was reciting lines he had written for his role in the television series Longstreet in 1971 [1]. So the sentence is scripted, Lee's own, and first spoken on television; the tradition's 1971 interview is that. The Japanese is in no book to 1946 in the National Diet Library [2] and not in the Japanese encyclopedia's long article on Lee [3]; it is a good short rendering: the vocative first, the imperative last.
What is not a source. The line has no Japanese source; it is an English line put into Japanese.
Today. What a rendering must keep is the vocative and the imperative.
A reading
Lee's own line, scripted for television in 1971, put into Japanese honestly: 友よ first, as Japanese addresses a friend, and なれ last, as Japanese commands.
References
- "Bruce Lee", English Wikiquote, citing Bruce Lee: A Warrior's Journey (2000). https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bruce_Lee
- National Diet Library Digital Collections, next-generation full-text search on 友よ水になれ, 0 books to 1946. https://lab.ndl.go.jp/dl/
- 「ブルース・リー」, Japanese Wikipedia. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/ブルース・リー