臥魚將腳抷 Lying Fish And Raised Heel
逐句解 Line by line
At Narrow-Brick she is especially deft; at Lying-Fish the foot spreads wide.
抷 is pī — 康熙 手部五畫 gives 匹眉切 and 攀悲切, 音丕, and glosses it 披也, to spread or part. 臥魚, a fish lying over on its side, is still the name of a move in Chinese opera for a deep sideways bend, which gives a fair idea of the shape. 將 is jiāng, taking hold of the foot before doing something with it.
Level-Waist, a bend of the knee and down into a crouch; Twist-Crown, the heel lifted in the slipper.
Four named positions in ten characters, each two characters long — the line is a drill card. 折 is zhé, to bend, not shé, to snap. 屣 closes the line, the second time it has done so, and the second time it has stood outside the rhyme the rest of the piece keeps.
At Pull-the-Stool she can put on a fine show; at Over-the-Shoulder she is wonderfully free.
甚 is shèn, an adverb — very, exceedingly. 脫灑 is the old order of the word we now write the other way round, and it means unforced, easy, without stiffness. Look 灑 up in a modern dictionary and you will get sǎ, to sprinkle — so the reading printed here, shài, will look like a mistake. It is not. The character has carried several readings for as long as anyone has been writing them down, and they belong to different sound-families. This line sits in a rhyming run, and the family it has to rhyme with is the one holding 楷, 海, 拐, 擺 and 買 — what the old books call 皆來. 中原音韻 of 1324 files 灑 in exactly that family and in no other, sitting beside 曬 shài, to dry in the sun. 康熙 水部十九畫 records the same reading at 所賣切 and glosses it 音曬 — sounds like 曬. The modern sǎ comes down a different branch of the word's history, and this rhyme shuts that branch out. Your dictionary is right about today; the poem is right about 1592; and this edition prints what the poem needs.
Crossed-Crotch, back and forth as she pleases; Locked-Neck, swaying along with it.
絞襠 and 鎖項 name the moves by the part of the body the ball passes — across the crotch, around the neck. 任 and 隨 are doing the same job in both halves: letting it happen, going along with it. Twelve lines into the trick list, the poem starts describing ease.
Ten characters a line, two named moves a line, and the effect in Chinese is a rattle of technical terms delivered at speed. It is the sound of somebody who knows the game showing off that they know it.
The rhyme is doing real work here and is worth setting out, because it varies more than you would expect across this one chapter. This long piece keeps a single sound through nearly every line — the group that holds bright, sea, crook, sway, buy and gather. Three closes stand outside it, and two of those are the slipper, which turns up twice. Compare the shorter piece earlier in the chapter, where only four of six closes chimed, and the regulated poem before it, which did not miss once. Three set-pieces, three different degrees of strictness.
Underneath the vocabulary, notice what the poem is actually recording: three women doing something difficult, very well, for their own amusement. The scene is genuinely admiring. It is also being watched from a wood by a man who has not announced himself, and the longer the trick list runs, the longer he has been standing there.