Now that dragon, having eaten Sanzang's white horse, lay low in the middle of the gorge-bed, nursing its spirit and biding quietly — when it heard someone hurling abuse and demanding a horse.

卻說 switches us to the far side of the water, and the switch matters: the novel is about to give the monster a point of view. 潛靈養性, "sink the spirit and nourish the nature", is lifted straight out of the vocabulary of Daoist self-cultivation — the language of a hermit at his practice — and it is being applied to a dragon lying on a river bed digesting a stolen horse. 索馬 is to demand the horse back. Both 那 are the pointing nà; 聽得 takes the unstressed de.

Unable to hold down the fire rising in its heart, it flung itself up in a rush, leaping through the waves and churning the billows, and sprang to the surface crying: "Who is it that dares run his mouth and insult me here?"

按不住 is "could not press it down", and what could not be pressed down is 心中火發, fire starting up in the heart — Chinese has always kept anger and fire in the same drawer. 跳將上來 is "leapt up", 將 jiāng a hinge before the direction word. 海口 is literally a mouth the size of the sea, and means big talk: the dragon has been lying there listening to it. 那個 asks "who?", hence nǎ.

The Pilgrim, seeing it, gave a great roar: "Stay where you are! Give me back my horse!"

大咤一聲 is to let out a great shout, 咤 read zhà. 休走 is "don't you run"; 還我馬來 takes 還 as huán. The loach jibe has done precisely what it was meant to do.

Swinging his cudgel, he struck straight at its head.

掄 lūn is to swing something heavy in an arc, its 著 the unstressed zhe; 劈頭 is straight at the head, with no preliminaries whatever.

The dragon bared its fangs and flailed its claws and came clawing at him.

張牙舞爪 zhāng yá wǔ zhǎo, "bares its fangs and brandishes its claws", is the standard phrase for an animal going all out — and it is one of the idioms that made it into ordinary modern Chinese, where it now describes a person throwing their weight about in an office. Here, for once, there really are fangs and claws. 那條 is the pointing nà.

The bout the two of them fought there at the edge of the gorge was fierce indeed. And this was the sight of it:

賭鬥 is to have it out; 驍雄 xiāo xióng is fierce and valiant. In 這一場 the 場 counts the bout as one occasion and is read cháng. Then 但見那 raises the curtain: what follows is a 賦, a rhapsody, and its whole method is pairing.

The dragon unfurled its keen claws; the monkey raised his golden hoop.

A tight four-and-four opening. 舒 is to stretch out or unfurl; 金箍, the gold hoop, stands in for the whole staff. Dragon and monkey are set side by side from the first line, and the rhapsody holds that arrangement to the end — every line one against the other, blow answering blow.

That one — its whiskers hung down like threads of white jade; this one — his eyes flashed like lamps of ruddy gold.

那個… 這個, "that one… this one", are the hinges the set-piece swings on — 那 the pointing nà, 這 zhè — with the dragon always "that one" and Wukong always "this one". Feature answers feature: whiskers trailing like threads of white jade, eyes flaring like lamps of red gold.

That one — the bright pearl beneath its whiskers spat out a coloured mist; this one — the iron staff in his hand whirled up a wild wind.

The pairing moves from features to weapons: the dragon's 明珠, the bright pearl beneath its chin, against Wukong's 鐵棒, the iron staff; mist against wind. Keep that pearl in mind. Guanyin takes it away at the end of the chapter, and everything it does stops with it. 手中 reads 中 as zhōng; 那個 is nà.

That one is a wretch of a son who wronged his own parents; this one is a sprite who once bullied the generals of Heaven.

Now the couplet hands each fighter a criminal record. 業子, with 子 in its full sense of "son" and read zǐ, is a son who is himself a piece of bad karma: this dragon wronged its own parents, which is why it is serving out a sentence in a gorge. Against that, 欺天將 — 將 here is jiàng, a general, and the generals are Heaven's, whom Wukong routed in his rebellion. 妖精 is a sprite or monster. Two offenders, and neither has the least idea what he is looking at.

The two of them, each for the tribulations laid upon him, had suffered grinding hardship; now, to win through, each put forth all his power.

都, read dōu, ties the pair together: both of them. And the word that ties them is 難, read nàn — not the nán of "difficult" but the heavier sense, calamity, a doom laid on a creature from outside. 磨折 is grinding hardship; 各顯能 is each putting out everything he has. In two lines the rhapsody has quietly reclassified the fight. This is not hero against monster. It is two convicts working off the same sentence, trying to kill each other.