這場好鬥 This Fine Bout
兩個這場好鬥：两个这场好斗：
逐句解 Line by line
A fine bout the two of them made of it:
The tag is descriptive rather than one of the fixed formulas, and it stands on its own line, which is the signal that description is about to take the wheel for a while.
Gold-hooped cudgel, wrought-iron staff — the faces changed, and no more reckoning as friends.
The poem opens by naming the two weapons and nothing else, so the fighters enter it as their arms. 變臉 is to change countenance — the phrase modern Chinese still uses for a friend turning cold in an instant — and 不以朋友論 is to stop treating one another as friends.
That one says: "It is you, ape, that I blame for the harming of my son."
Here the poem does something none of the chapter's earlier ones does: it starts quoting. 那個說 and 這個說 — that one says, this one says — alternate for four lines, so that a shouted argument is set in verse. 子 is zǐ, son.
This one says: "Your honoured son has attained the Way; have done with your resentment."
得道 takes dé, attainment. The reply squeezes into seven characters the whole argument the Great Sage made at length in prose a few passages back.
That one says: "Witless creature, how dare you come to my gate?"
那個 is the pointing kind. The second exchange abandons the son altogether and moves to the trespass, exactly as the prose quarrel did.
This one says: "I have my reasons, and came expressly to ask."
相問 takes xiāng. 有因 — having a reason — is the mildest possible account of an errand that has so far produced a chase and a duel.
The one would beg the fan to guard the Tang Monk; the one will not lend the banana-leaf, and is mean beyond measure.
A reading worth catching, because it hangs on how the line is cut. 要 is yào, the modal, and the sense is 要 plus 求扇子: would beg for the fan. Read 要求 as the modern compound meaning to demand and you get yāo and the wrong line. 忒 is the vernacular intensifier, excessively. Note too that the quotation marks drop away here and both sides are reported in the third person.
Words going and words coming lose the old affection; a whole house without right feeling, and rancour breeding in them all.
舉家 — the whole household — widens the quarrel from two men to a family, and the reader is meant to count in the Rākṣasī, the Jade-Faced Princess and the Red Boy.
The Bull King's staff rises, outdoing a flood-dragon; the Great Sage's cudgel meets it, and gods and demons flee.
賽 is sài, to outdo in contest. The couplet returns from speech to combat and restores the strict parallel of the opening.
At first they strove and fought before the mountain; afterwards they rode the auspicious cloud together and mounted.
初時 and 後來 mark the only movement the fight has: from the ground into the air. 齊 insists they rise together, neither one driving the other up.
In mid-air they showed their divine powers; amid five-coloured light they worked their marvellous turns.
中 is zhōng. 妙運 is skilled manoeuvring — the vocabulary here is of craft rather than of fury.
The two staffs ring and shake the barrier of heaven; no winning or losing is to be seen, and the two are matched within a cùn.
傍 is páng, beside. 皆傍寸 is obscure and appears to mean that neither can gain more than a 寸 on the other — a cùn being the small length measure, roughly three centimetres, that sits under the 尺. The line is given as printed and no reading is claimed for it beyond the character's standing value.
This poem does something none of the chapter's earlier ones does: it quotes. Four consecutive lines are speeches, marked "that one says" and "this one says" and set in quotation marks inside the verse, so that the argument of the preceding prose is replayed in metre. The son, the trespass, the fan, the refusal — the same four points in the same order, each compressed to seven characters.
The compression is what makes it interesting. In prose the Great Sage needed a long sentence to argue that the Red Boy had been promoted rather than destroyed; in verse he needs seven characters. What the poem supplies is not new information but the shape of the quarrel seen all at once, and the shape is perfectly symmetrical: accusation, answer, accusation, answer, and then a couplet stating both positions in the third person with nothing to choose between them.
The last line is the point of the whole piece. Two staffs shake the barrier of heaven and nothing whatever is decided. Every couplet after the dialogue insists on the balance — the staff rises and the cudgel meets it, they climb together, they show their powers together — and the closing 不見輸贏 makes the deadlock explicit. The fight cannot resolve the chapter, and the novel says so in verse before it says so in prose.