不亞神仙 No Less Than The Immortals
逐句解 Line by line
Wild deer, two by two, tread the green sedge at their ease, all care forgotten;
綠莎 is green sedge, and the reading carries the line. 莎 is suō here, not the shā most dictionaries list first — shā belongs to the katydid of 莎雞 and to place names like 莎車. 康熙 艸部七畫 gives 蘇禾切, 音唆, and calls it flatly 草名, a plant name; the entry then quotes 馬融's 廣成頌 at 被以綠莎, clothed with green sedge — the same two characters in the same order as here. 中原音韻 files it in 歌戈 and in no other rime, which is where an -uo syllable belongs; a shā reading would have to sit in 家麻, and it does not. 茵 is a mat or a cushion, so the deer are walking on upholstery.
Mountain birds, pair by pair, call to one another in flight, high in the red treetops.
杪 is the thin far end of a branch, the very tip — a precise word where English has only "treetop". And the mirror across the two lines is exact: 雙雙 answers 對對, both meaning two by two; deer on the ground answer birds in the air; green answers red.
Truly this is the Tiantai grotto of Liu and Ruan; no less, indeed, than the immortals' home at Langyuan.
Two paradises to close, and both are borrowed. Liu Chen and Ruan Zhao went up Mount Tiantai to gather herbs, met two women there, stayed what felt like half a year, and came home to find their descendants seven generations on — the Chinese Rip Van Winkle, except that in this version the women are the whole point. 閬苑 is the immortals' garden on Kunlun. (不 becomes bú before the falling tone of 亞.)
The closing couplet is where the charm turns. Of all the comparisons available for a pretty mountain compound, the verse reaches for the single most famous story in Chinese about men who walk into a mountain grotto, meet beautiful women and lose track of time. The pilgrims have just come from a cave of women who turned out to be spiders. Nobody in the scene notices; the narrator has said it out loud and moved on.
It is a specific kind of joke, and the book plays it often. The verse tells the truth in a register the characters cannot hear — praise on the surface, warning underneath — and the reader is left holding the information alone for a few pages. Hold that thought. The compound in front of them is a Daoist house, and what happens there begins with tea.
One craftsman's detail before the prose resumes. Every line of this rhapsody has a partner and none is wasted: hills and stream, trees and flowers, egrets and orioles, deer and birds, and then two grottoes of the blessed. Four of this opening scene's doubled characters sit inside the verse — 森森, 豔豔, 雙雙, 對對 — against three scattered through the prose around it. The density is deliberate: this is the part meant to sound composed.