奎星招罪 The Star-Lord’s Confession
玉帝道：「奎木狼，上界有無邊的勝景，你不受用，卻私走一方，何也？」奎宿叩頭奏道：「萬歲，赦臣死罪。那寶象國王公主，非凡人也。他本是披香殿侍香的玉女，因欲與臣私通，臣恐點污了天宮勝境。他思凡先下界去，托生於皇宮內院。玉帝道：「奎木狼，上界有无边的胜景，你不受用，却私走一方，何也？」奎宿叩头奏道：「万岁，赦臣死罪。那宝象国王公主，非凡人也。他本是披香殿侍香的玉女，因欲与臣私通，臣恐点污了天宫胜境。他思凡先下界去，托生于皇宫内院。
逐句解 Line by line
The Jade Emperor said, "Kui the Wood-Wolf, the upper realm has scenes of boundless beauty; these you would not enjoy, but stole away privately to a quarter of the earth — why so?"
The Jade Emperor's question is the one a head of department asks. 無邊勝景, wú biān shèng jǐng, boundless fair scenery; 私走一方, sī zǒu yì fāng, to slip away privately to some corner of the world below. You had all this, and you went there?
The Kui lodge bowed his head and submitted, "Your Majesty, pardon your servant's capital crime.
奎宿, Kuí xiù, the Kui lodge — 宿 read xiù, a lunar mansion. 赦臣死罪, shè chén sǐ zuì, "pardon your servant's capital crime," is the fixed formula for opening a confession to a throne. It does not mean he expects to die; it means he knows the etiquette.
The princess, daughter of the King of Baoxiang, is no mortal woman.
非凡人也, fēi fán rén yě, "she is no mortal woman." One line, and the whole chapter has to be reread.
She was in origin the jade-maiden who tends the incense in the Hall of Spreading Fragrance; because she wished to have secret union with your servant, and I feared to defile the fair precincts of the heavenly palace—
披香殿, Pīxiāng Diàn, the Hall of Spreading Fragrance, is a celestial hall; a 侍香玉女, shì xiāng yù nǚ, is a jade-maiden whose office is tending the incense. 點污, diǎn wū, to sully, to leave a stain on. Notice how the sentence is built: she wanted the union, and he was concerned about the decor.
she, yearning for the mortal world, went down first and was reborn within the palace of the king.
思凡, sī fán, "to yearn for the mortal world," is the stock motive for any celestial's descent in Chinese fiction — homesickness for a home one has never had. 托生, tuō shēng, to be reborn, to take mortal birth. She went first; he followed.
The confession recasts the whole preceding drama. What looked like a demon's abduction of an innocent princess turns out to be the earthly working-out of a celestial romance: the star-lord and the incense-maiden, forbidden each other above, are drawn together below. The revelation softens the demon's guilt in retrospect and complicates the princess's victimhood, disclosing a prior bond of desire underneath the appearance of captivity.
The device is thoroughly characteristic of the novel's cosmology, in which earthly entanglements so often turn out to be the shadow cast by heavenly ones, and mortal lives the vehicle for debts contracted among the stars. The star-lord's careful apportioning of initiative — the maiden wished it, he feared to defile Heaven, she descended first — both excuses him and prepares the doctrine of foreordination with which he closes the account.