劍鬣長身 Sword Bristles And A Long Body
真個是：真个是：
逐句解 Line by line
And it truly was:
Three characters, a bare announcement with no bracket and nothing after it, so it stands alone and opens the recitation rather than opening it from inside a longer unit.
A long snout and short bristles, half of him fat and flesh; from his youth in the hills he fed on the shoots of herbs.
長 is cháng, the size sense. Every rhyme word in this portrait is level in tone — biāo, miáo, jiāo, láo, then the fourth, then ráo, xiāo, gāo — and the opening line rhymes at its midpoint as well as its end.
A black face and round eyes like sun and moon, a round head and great ears like plantain leaves.
似 is fixed at sì. The two similes reach for the sky and then for a garden plant inside a single couplet.
He cultivated bones as hard as the life of heaven, and refined a hide tougher than iron.
修成 and 煉就 are both terms of Daoist self-cultivation — the vocabulary of refining an immortal body, applied here to a pig's bones and skin.
A stopped-up snuffle in the nose and a squalling cry; a chattering in the throat and a snorting grunt.
This is the line the whole portrait turns on, and it hangs on one character. 哮 is read xiāo here, against the xiào of 咆哮, "to roar," that the corpus otherwise fixes. The 1716 dictionary gives as its main entry a spelling that yields xiāo, glossed from the ancient 說文 as the noise of a startled pig — and files the xiào reading separately under a different spelling, glossed "to call out." The rhyme here is level throughout and xiào is a falling tone, so sense, spelling and metre all agree. The line is built entirely out of doubled animal noises.
Four white trotters a thousand chǐ high, sword-like bristles on a body a good hundred zhàng long.
長 is cháng again. A chǐ is the Chinese foot and a zhàng is ten of them, so the two measures in this line are a hundredfold apart and both of them are hyperbole.
Fat swine have been seen among men before, but never till today this old pig demon.
觀 is guān, to behold — not the guàn that means a Daoist temple. 間 is jiān.
The Tang Monk and all the rest praised him with one voice, admiring how high the Marshal of the Heavenly Reeds could carry his powers.
稱 is chēng. 天蓬, Marshal of the Heavenly Reeds, is Eight Rules's rank from his time in heaven before he was thrown out — produced here at the exact moment he is least dignified.
The chapter's last portrait is of a pig, and it is built exactly like the first one it gave — the self-portrait of Pilgrim, four thousand characters back. Origin, then body, then cultivation, then a closing line in which somebody names him.
The fourth couplet is where the piece turns. Four doubled noises in fourteen characters, all of them animal, and the last of them a character the rest of the corpus reads as the roar of a tiger — which the old dictionary files first under the sound of a startled pig. The rhyme insists on that reading and the sense agrees with it.
The last couplet does the work the portrait exists for. He has been called an idiot throughout, has been knocked flat by a tail, and has just been sent to root through a lane of rotten fruit — and the closing line calls him Marshal of the Heavenly Reeds and says the company admired him.