變作蜜蜂 Changed into a Bee
孫大聖顯個神通，捻著訣，念個咒語，搖身一變，變作蜜蜂兒，真個輕巧。你看他：孙大圣显个神通，捻着诀，念个咒语，摇身一变，变作蜜蜂儿，真个轻巧。你看他：
逐句解 Line by line
The Great Sage displayed a magic power of his: he made the sign with his fingers, recited a spell, shook himself, and changed into a bee — a truly deft and dainty thing. Look at him:
捻著 is the ongoing-action zhe. 蜜蜂兒 takes the curled-tongue ending er. The tag 你看他 — "look at him" — belongs to the prose that introduces the verse, so it stays with this line rather than heading the poem.
Its wings so thin they go soft upon the wind, its waist so light it shows slender against the sun.
薄 is read báo, physical thinness you could measure; the literary bó belongs to figurative senses — a thin fate, thin daylight — and to the bound pairs that carry them. The reading is proposed here and flagged for ruling.
Its mouth is sweet, and has gone seeking the hearts of flowers; its tail is keen, and is good at bringing the toad down.
降 is xiáng, to subdue — the bee masters the toad, it does not land on it. The other reading, jiàng, means to come down, and both turn up in this chapter. This couplet sets the bee's sweetness against its sting, which is the point of the whole transformation and, as it happens, a fair description of who is waiting inside.
In the brewing of honey its merit is no shallow thing; attending upon the court, it is of itself modest in ceremony.
投衙 draws on an old conceit, the bee-yamen: a swarm gathering morning and evening around its queen was likened to junior officials reporting for duty at the magistrate's office. Think of a hive as a civil service with a very short commute. 衙 is yá.
And now it puts a cunning stratagem to work, and comes dancing in beneath the eaves of the gate.
The closing couplet turns natural history into plot. Every quality catalogued above — the thin wings, the sweet mouth, the sharp tail — is now a tool for getting through a door.
Of the seventy-two shapes Pilgrim can take, the bee is among the smallest, and he takes it for the reason he always takes it: he needs to get past a door he has not opened. What is unusual is that the novel stops to admire the disguise. Four lines of tightly regulated verse are spent on an insect the size of a thumbnail, and the mismatch is the joke.
The vocabulary of the poem is oddly bureaucratic. The bee 投衙, presents itself at the magistrate's office, and is 禮自謙, modest in its manners — the swarm around a queen having long been read as a court in miniature, complete with attendance rosters and correct behaviour. Placed here, the conceit has a barb in it. Pilgrim is about to walk into the household of a queen of quite another sort, and he will observe none of the manners at all.
The middle couplet does the real work. A mouth that seeks the hearts of flowers and a tail that can bring down a toad are two ends of one creature, and the chapter to come is built on exactly that doubleness: sweetness in front, a sting behind. It is an accurate description of a bee. It is a better one of the scorpion, and the reader gets her character in a line about an insect, several pages before she opens her mouth.