鳳目金睛 The Elephant On The Left
左手下那個生得：左手下那个生得：
逐句解 Line by line
The one on his left hand looked like this:
Left hand, and in the Chinese seating order that is the senior of the two flanking places. The three of them are arranged the way a court is arranged, not the way a gang is.
Phoenix eyes and golden pupils, yellow tusks and heavy legs.
鳳目 — phoenix eyes, long and narrowing at the outer corner — is a beauty compliment in ordinary use, which makes it a strange thing to hand a monster. The couplet then drops from those eyes straight to tusks and thick legs, and the mismatch is the whole effect.
A long trunk and silver bristles, a head that looked much like a tail.
長 is cháng, long — the measurement reading, not zhǎng, to grow. 看頭似尾 is the old joke about elephants, that from a distance you cannot tell which end you are looking at, and the poet gets it in without ever saying elephant.
A round forehead and furrowed brows, a body heaped and massive.
磊磊 lěi lěi is a doubling that means stones piled up — used of a body, it is bulk without shape. Chinese loves these repeated pairs for texture, and no translation of one has ever quite worked.
A voice as delicate as a graceful beauty, a jade face like the ox-headed demon of hell.
The poem's best line, and it works by putting two clichés back to back and letting them fight. 窈窕佳人 comes out of the oldest layer of the Book of Songs; 牛頭 is Ox-Head, one of the two gatekeepers of the Chinese underworld and a face every reader had seen painted on a temple wall. A demon with a beautiful voice and a hangman's face.
This one was the old yellow-tusked elephant, who had hidden his teeth and cultivated himself for many a year.
藏齒 is cáng, to conceal — and 修身, self-cultivation, is the central term of Confucian moral training, borrowed here for a demon's centuries of practice. Hiding your teeth while you improve yourself is not a bad summary of the whole cave.
Every portrait in this sequence is built on the same frame — three short couplets, one long one, then the naming line — and the elephant's is where the frame starts showing what it can do. The short couplets handle anatomy; the long one is allowed a joke; the naming line pays it off.
修身 is worth stopping on. It is the phrase from the Great Learning, the sequence every educated Ming reader had by heart: cultivate the self, then order the family, then govern the state. Applying it to a self-improving elephant demon is funny, but it is not only funny. Demons in this book get their power exactly the way saints do, by long practice, and the novel never lets the reader forget that the two roads start at the same gate.