三女容華 The Three Beauties
逐句解 Line by line
Each with moth-brows arched in kingfisher-green, / powdered faces breathing spring.
蛾眉橫翠 “moth-antenna brows spread with kingfisher (blue-green),” the classic figure for a beauty's eyebrows. 粉面生春 “powdered face bringing forth spring,” i.e. radiant with youthful allure. 一個個 “each one.”
Bewitching, a nation-toppling beauty; / graceful, they stir the heart.
傾國色 “beauty that topples a kingdom,” the hyperbole of 傾國傾城 for the supremely lovely. 窈窕 “graceful and demure,” from the Shijing's opening ode.
Flowered hair-ornaments show their many charms; / embroidered sashes flutter, far beyond the dust of the world.
花鈿 (huādiàn) an inlaid floral hair-ornament. 多嬌態 “many alluring poses.” 迥絕塵 “utterly transcending the mundane dust,” of otherworldly grace.
Where the half-held smile breaks, cherry-lips part; / as they step slowly, orchid and musk waft forth.
櫻桃綻 “cherry (lips) bursting,” the stock image for a small red mouth. 緩步行時 “when they walk with slow steps,” 行 xíng (“to walk”). 蘭麝 “orchid and musk,” fragrant perfumes.
Their heads heaped with pearls and kingfisher-jade, / a-tremble with countless jeweled hairpins;
珠翠 “pearls and kingfisher-feather ornaments.” 顫巍巍 “trembling, quivering,” of the swaying head-dress. 寶釵簪 “jeweled pins and combs.”
Their whole persons subtly fragrant, / delicately lovely, with fine gold thread worked in flowers.
遍體幽香 “a faint fragrance over their whole bodies.” 嬌滴滴 “tender and dripping with charm.” 花金縷細 “fine gold filigree wrought as flowers.”
Why speak of the Chu maidens' beauty, / or Xi Shi's alluring face?
說甚麼 “what need to mention,” 甚 shén. 楚娃 “the beauties of Chu.” 西子 (Xīzǐ) is Xi Shi, the ancient paragon of beauty; 子 here the honorific zǐ. The daughters outshine even these.
Truly they are as fairy maidens of the Ninth Heaven come down from the sky, / or the Moon's Chang'e stepping forth from the Cold Palace.
九天仙女 “fairy maidens of the Ninth Heaven.” 從天降 “descending from heaven,” 降 jiàng. 嫦娥 Chang'e, goddess of the moon; 廣寒 the Guanghan (“Vast Cold”) Palace, her lunar abode.
The descriptive 詞 that renders the three daughters is a virtuoso beauty-portrait, assembled from the whole conventional repertoire: moth-brows and powdered faces, cherry lips and grace-filled steps, floral hair-ornaments and jeweled pins, orchid-and-musk perfume and gold-thread embroidery. Each couplet adds another stroke to an image of near-supernatural loveliness.
Its rhetoric culminates, as such portraits do, in comparison to the great exemplars of beauty — the maidens of Chu, Xi Shi herself — only to set even these aside: the daughters are likened at last to fairy maidens of the Ninth Heaven and to Chang'e descending from her lunar Cold Palace. The hyperbole places them beyond the mortal.
Coming where it does, the portrait is charged with dramatic irony. These “daughters” are the bodhisattvas' contrivance, the loveliest bait of the four saints' test; the reader knows the beauty is a snare, and knows that the descriptive lavishness is aimed, past the assembled pilgrims, at the one whose gaze — as the next passage shows — is already fixed and helpless upon it.