原文 Original text
繁體 Traditional
Reader's edition
且聽下回 To Be Continued
畢竟不知向後何年何月，方滿災殃，且聽下回分解。毕竟不知向后何年何月，方满灾殃，且听下回分解。
逐句解 Line by line
畢竟不知向後何年何月，方滿災殃，且聽下回分解。
毕竟不知向后何年何月，方满灾殃，且听下回分解。
After all, there is no knowing in what year, in what month hereafter his calamity will at last be fulfilled — so listen to the next chapter for the explanation.
The storyteller's standard sign-off. 畢竟… 且聽下回分解 — after all… listen to the next instalment for the telling — ends every 回 of the novel, a leftover from the days when a professional teller needed his audience back tomorrow. Note the shape as well: our house rule keeps embedded verse running to the end of a passage, and this closing formula is the one place where we let prose follow verse.
The chapter ends, as every chapter does, on the storyteller's hook: 且聽下回分解, listen to the next instalment for the telling. The question it leaves open — in what year and month the monkey's calamity will be fulfilled — is the very thing the poems have just answered in principle (when the Tang monk comes) while leaving it unanswered in fact. The reader is put in exactly the suspense the imprisoned monkey is in: a fixed sentence of unknown length.
Structurally this short prose tag is the chapter's one exception to the pattern in which verse always runs to the end of a passage. Here the closing couplet of the verdict-poem (且待唐朝出聖僧) is followed by the formula — the storyteller stepping back out of the cosmic verdict and into the humbler business of keeping tomorrow's audience. With that, the great Havoc-in-Heaven cycle of chapters 1 to 7 closes, and the novel turns toward the pilgrimage it has spent seven chapters getting ready.