割斷罷了 Then Cut The Rope
那怪一齊叩頭道:「大聖慈悲,饒我性命,願送老師父過山。」行者笑道:「你要性命,只消拿刀把繩子割斷罷了。」老魔道:「爺爺呀!割斷外邊的,這裡邊的拴在心上,喉嚨裡又㮇㮇的惡心,怎生是好?」那怪一齐叩头道:「大圣慈悲,饶我性命,愿送老师父过山。」行者笑道:「你要性命,只消拿刀把绳子割断罢了。」老魔道:「爷爷呀!割断外边的,这里边的拴在心上,喉咙里又㮇㮇的恶心,怎生是好?」
逐句解 Line by line
The monsters knocked their heads on the ground together and said: "Great Sage, have mercy. Spare our lives, and we will gladly see the old master over the mountain."
叩頭 — to knock the head on the ground, the full form of submission.
Wukong laughed and said: "If you want your lives, you have only to take a knife and cut the cord through."
把 reads bǎ, the particle that puts the object before the verb — take the cord and cut it. It is not the bà that means the handle of a tool.
The old fiend said: "Grandfather!
爺爺 is the father-side grandfather, and NOT the 外公 of the mother-side that Wukong demanded at the opening. Under pressure the demon reaches for the more respectful of the two.
Cut the outside part, and the part in here is still tied to my heart, and there is a retching in my throat. What am I to do?"
㮇 reads tiàn. 康熙字典 carries no entry for it under the wood radical, but uses it as a sound gloss under the tongue radical, spelling it 他念切; the Ming rhyme book 韻畧易通 lists it in the falling tone with the sense of a fire-poker. Doubled here, it is the sound of retching.
Wukong's advice is offered helpfully and is entirely useless, and he knows it. Cut the cord, he says, as though the problem were a knot rather than a hook. The demon has to explain the trap back to him, which is the humiliation the advice was designed to produce.
The word the old fiend reaches for is worth pausing on, because it is not quite the word he was told to use. Wukong demanded to be called grandfather on the mother's side, which in a system that marks which family a relative comes from is the outsider grandfather, and pointedly rude. What the demon cries here is the father-side term, the one for the grandfather you live with and defer to. Flat on his back in a pit, he has upgraded the insult into genuine respect.
The retching is described with a rare character that most dictionaries do not carry, and the choice is deliberate. An ordinary word would have named the feeling; this one imitates it. The Ming rhyme books that do list the character give it in a sense to do with poking and prodding, which is close to exactly what a cord end trailing down someone's throat would feel like.