賽過西施 Surpassing Xi Shi
豬八戒在傍，掬著嘴，餳眼觀看那女王，卻也嬝娜。真個：猪八戒在傍，掬着嘴，饧眼观看那女王，却也嬝娜。真个：
逐句解 Line by line
Zhu Eight Rules, standing by, thrust out his snout and looked the queen over with heavy, half-shut eyes; and she was indeed slender and graceful. Truly:
A hundred characters of high literary description are about to be delivered from the point of view of a pig with his mouth open. 餳眼 is xíng, the heavy-lidded or bleary eye — the reading táng belongs only to 餳 as malt sugar. 嬝娜 is niǎo nuó, slender and swaying, one of several ways of writing the word; the reading nà for 娜 belongs to personal names, not here. 掬著 takes the zhe that holds an action in place; 在傍 is bàng.
Brows like kingfisher plumes; flesh like the fat of mutton-jade.
翠羽 are the blue-green kingfisher feathers used in Chinese jewellery. 羊脂 is mutton-fat jade, the whitest and most prized grade of nephrite — the comparison is to stone, not to meat.
Her cheeks set off by petals of peach blossom; her coiled hair heaped with threads of golden phoenix.
鬟 is the looped coil a woman's hair was dressed into. 金鳳絲 are the fine gold wires worked into a phoenix ornament, not hair of any colour.
Autumn ripples, clear and deep — a bewitching air; spring bamboo-shoots, slender and fine — a tender, winning grace.
Two standard figures, each naming a part of the body and then the quality it conveys. 秋波 — autumn ripples — is the long-established figure for a woman's glance, and is still the phrase Chinese reaches for when someone gives another a meaningful look. 春筍, spring bamboo shoots, is the figure for her fingers.
Red gauze hanging aslant floats out its brilliant colour; pearl and kingfisher pinned high show forth their radiance.
軃 is duǒ, to hang loose or trail. 綃 is the sheerest grade of raw silk gauze. The couplet moves from the dress to the headdress, completing the descent begun in the lines before.
What talk is there of Zhaojun's beauty? Truly she outdoes Xi Shi herself.
The rhetorical hinge of the portrait: the conventional comparisons are named only to be declared insufficient. 昭君 is Wang Zhaojun and 西施 is Xi Shi, two of the four great beauties of Chinese antiquity. 甚麼 takes 甚 as shén; 賽 is sài.
Her willow waist bends a little and the gold pendants chime; her lotus steps move lightly and stir her limbs of jade.
蓮步 — lotus steps — is the figure for a woman's small, measured walk. This is the only couplet in the portrait that puts her in motion, and it comes just where the reader has been looking at a stationary face for ten lines.
Chang'e in the moon could scarcely come up to this; how should the immortal maids of the ninefold heaven be such as she?
The escalation now leaves human beauties behind for divine ones, which is the conventional last move of such a portrait. 嫦娥 is Chang'e, the moon goddess. 難 is nán; 仙子 takes 子 as the ending zi.
Her palace dress of cunning fashion is of no common kind — truly the Queen Mother come down from the Jasper Pool.
王母 is the Queen Mother of the West and 瑤池 her Jasper Pool in the Kunlun range. Ending on her is a deliberate choice: the Queen Mother is the one woman in the Chinese pantheon who rules in her own right rather than as somebody's consort, which is exactly what the woman being described is. 降 is jiàng, to descend.
The portrait is conventional to its bones, and that is the joke, because of who is looking. Every figure in it is standard issue — kingfisher brows, mutton-fat flesh, autumn-ripple eyes, spring-shoot fingers, willow waist, lotus steps — and the escalation runs the standard course, from Zhaojun and Xi Shi up through Chang'e to the Queen Mother of the West. It is the sort of set-piece a poet would turn out for any beautiful woman. It is here being turned out for a pig looking at a queen with his eyes half shut and his mouth hanging open.
The frame makes the point. The passage opens on 豬八戒在傍, 掬著嘴, 餳眼觀看 — Eight Rules at the side, snout out, eyes gone heavy — then delivers a hundred characters of high literary description, and returns in the next passage to the drool running down his chin. The novel is not mocking the queen's beauty, which it takes entirely seriously. It is mocking the machinery for describing beauty, by handing it to the least qualified operator in the book.
The last line repays attention all the same. Of every divine woman available, the portrait ends on 王母降瑤池 — the Queen Mother of the West, who is not somebody's consort but a sovereign in her own right, holding her own court on Kunlun. For a chapter whose whole subject is a woman who rules, the choice of closing comparison is not decorative.