Trying to Understand the Finger Rift in Bengbu

A Werner Herzog quote at the movie theater in Bengbu appeared to a be relatively clear case of what can happen when one attempts to translate translation back into the original language. Figuring this out was especially satisfying because often when I attempt to track down the source of English that for one reason or another catches my attention in China I feel like I am going down the rabbit hole.

Such was the case with an example elsewhere in the same shopping mall with the theater. On a men's restroom wall I saw a decal I have seen in China before in places like cafes:

Romantic City

Love is promised     twisted in the love   between
Finger rift    the fingers

I didn't understand the message, but perhaps nothing is wrong with the English. Poetry often involves creative language usage that wouldn't typically be considered grammatical or is not transparent in meaning. I was curious to see if I could sort this out.

An online search for an exact match to the message came up empty. But I did find an online site selling the same decal. They display it with the words in a different order.

Romantic City

Love is promised between the fingers
Finger rift twisted in the love

An online search for an exact match to this version also came up empty, but there were many matches to a slightly different version without the word "is":

Love, promised between the fingers
Finger rift, twisted in the love

Notably, most of these matches appear to be on sites based in Chinese. The quote often appears in a lists of quotes presented in both English and Chinese. This is the usual Chinese version:

爱情... 在指缝间承诺
指缝... 在爱情下交缠

Sometimes the list of quotes is described as "classical English" and some of the other quotes are recognizable or similar to other familiar quotes.

Elsewhere online, it isn't hard to find examples elsewhere of people asking in Chinese about the meaning of the English version. Typically somebody replies with the usual Chinese version without any further commentary.

Despite trying several different approaches, I have gotten much further than this. I couldn't find any attribution for the quote in either Chinese or English. And while I wonder whether something happened similar to what happened to the Herzog quote, I don't even know in which language the quote originated.

So if you can catch this rabbit, please let me know. And finger rift, the fingers . . .