Hearing this, the Pilgrim said: "So you are the Water God of the Heavenly Reeds, come down into the world. No wonder you know old Sun's name."

Wukong works out the rank before he is given the name. 天蓬水神, Water God of the Heavenly Reeds, is enough to place him. 怪道 is the colloquial "no wonder" — 道 here is not the verb "to say," and reading it that way is the standard trap.

The fiend gave a snort. "Hnh! You Ban-horsemaster, you deceiver of your betters!

哏 (gén) is a written grunt, a stage direction on the page. 誑上, deceiving one's superiors, is a formal charge lifted straight from the celestial indictment: the fiend is still talking like an officer of the court. And 弼馬溫, Ban-horsemaster, is the insult that always lands, because it is the one job Wukong ever actually held.

When you stirred up that calamity in your day, you have no idea how many of us you dragged down with you — and now you come here to bully men again.

The real grievance, and it is a bureaucratic one. 帶累 is to be dragged down along with somebody else, with 累 read lěi; Wukong's revolt cost the middle ranks their posts, and this is a middle-ranker saying so. 當年 takes 當 as dāng.

No insolence! Taste my rake!" The Pilgrim was in no mood to indulge him; he raised his rod and struck straight at his head.

吃我一鈀, "eat my rake," is the stock challenge of vernacular fiction — the ancestor of every "taste my steel" in English. 容情 is to go easy on someone. 當頭就打: a blow aimed square at the top of the head, with no preamble at all.

The two of them fell to it in the middle of that mountain, in the dark of night — a fine fight indeed:

好殺, "a fine slaughter," is the storyteller announcing a battle-poem, the same class of cue as 但見那. It closes off the prose; the rhapsody starts on the next line.

The Pilgrim's golden pupils were as lightning; the fiend's ringed eyes, as flowers of silver.

The poem opens by pairing the eyes. 金睛, the golden pupils, were fired into Wukong in Lord Lao's furnace and he has had them ever since; 環眼, round staring eyes, are what face-reading assigns to the brute. 似 is sì in both halves.

This one's mouth spat coloured mist; that one's breath poured forth red haze.

這一個 and 那一個 — this one, that one — set up the call-and-response the poem keeps coming back to, in three of its nine units, with a fourth built on the same 一個…一個 shape. It is the shape of a boxing commentary, and it works for the same reason.

Breath pouring red haze lit the shadowed places; mouth spitting coloured mist made splendour of the night.

The line turns the previous one inside out, foot for foot: 氣吐紅霞 and 口噴彩霧 come back in the opposite order. Reversing a pair like this is a trick of the oral rhapsody — the audience hears the pattern flip, and enjoys catching it.

The gold-hooped rod, the nine-toothed rake — two heroes truly worth the praising: one a Great Sage come down to the mortal world, one a Marshal fallen to the ends of heaven.

The hinge of the poem. The lines shrink to three characters, then stretch right out. 臨凡世 and 降天涯 are set as a balanced pair, but the second half is the crueller: the Great Sage came down to the mortal world, while the Marshal simply fell to the ends of it. 降 is jiàng.

That one, for losing his dignity, was made a monster; this one, escaped by luck from his affliction, bows to the monkish house.

威儀 is the bearing an office requires — deportment as part of the job description. 苦難 takes 難 as nàn. Two lines that state the novel's economy of grace with brutal economy: one of them lost his dignity and became a monster, the other got out of his punishment and became a monk, and the difference was luck and a Bodhisattva.

The rake went out as a dragon puts forth its claws; the rod came on just as a phoenix threads the flowers.

龍伸爪, a dragon putting out its claws, and 鳳穿花, a phoenix threading through flowers, are stock moves of the fight-poem: the first for a raking stroke, the second for a weaving parry. Any reader of the genre knows what each one looks like before the sentence ends.

That one cried: "To wreck a man's marriage is to slay his father!" This one cried: "To force a young girl is to earn the rope!"

The one place where the source punctuation would mislead. Each shouted taunt ends in ！, which normally closes a unit — but the two are the halves of a single balanced couplet and have to be put back together by hand. Notice the charges themselves: wrecking a marriage, forcing a minor. They are indictments, drawn up in legal form, in the middle of a brawl.

Idle words, wild clamour, and back and forth the rod fenced off the rake.

閑言語，亂喧嘩 — idle words, wild noise. The poem dismisses its own dialogue as racket and goes back to the fight. 喧嘩 takes 嘩 as huá.

They fought and fought until the sky was near to dawn, and the fiend felt both his shoulders ache and go numb.

The rhapsody ends not on a flourish but on aching shoulders: 兩膊覺酸麻, both arms gone sore and numb. It is the first sign that the fiend will lose, and that he will lose to tiredness rather than to skill.