聲如霹靂 A Voice Like The Thunderclap
賽太歲，寡人親見他兩次，身長丈八，膊闊五停；面似金光，聲如霹靂。那裡是這般鄙矮？」行者笑道：「陛下認得，果然不是。赛太岁，寡人亲见他两次，身长丈八，膊阔五停；面似金光，声如霹雳。那里是这般鄙矮？」行者笑道：「陛下认得，果然不是。
逐句解 Line by line
"Sai Taisui I have seen twice with my own eyes: eight zhàng in height, and five sections across the shoulders;
長 is cháng here, length or height, against the zhǎng it took in 長老 a moment ago — the same character twice in one short scene, two readings, no change on the page. 丈 stays as zhàng: it is a Chinese unit and keeps its own name rather than being converted into feet. 停 is a proportional division of a body, the same measure used for reckoning a face in thirds.
"a face like golden light, a voice like a thunderclap. How should he be a stunted little thing of this sort?"
那 is nǎ, rhetorical — how could he possibly be — rather than the nà that points. The edition cuts this from the previous member with a semicolon and the two are read apart here: the first runs four items and carries a topic and a clause of its own, where this one runs two.
Pilgrim laughed: "Your Majesty knows him, and indeed it is not he.
認得 takes dé, the perceiving-verb reading. 果然 concedes the point without a moment's hesitation, and the laugh in front of it is not at the king's expense.
Four items of four characters each — height, shoulders, face, voice — and the king delivers them like a description circulated for identification. He has seen this demon twice, which is twice more than anybody else in the hall, and the detail he ends on is the voice, which is the one thing a corpse cannot be checked against.
The last of the four is the objection, and it changes register. Everything before it was measurement; how should he be a stunted little thing of this sort is contempt, and it is aimed at the body's size. The king is reasoning from the one attribute actually lying in front of him rather than from the face or the voice he could not verify — and this time the method works.
Wukong concedes at once and completely. He has spent the chapter letting other people be wrong at length; when the king turns out to be right he says so in eight characters and does not make him wait for it.