這場好殺 A Fine Fight In The Air
他兩個在半空中這場好殺：他两个在半空中这场好杀：
逐句解 Line by line
The two of them, up in the middle air, fought a fine fight:
這場好殺 is the fixed formula that introduces a battle poem, and the reader of a Ming novel would know from these four characters alone that verse is coming. 場 is cháng, the measure word for a whole episode or bout, not the chǎng that means a place.
The As-You-Will rod, the coiled-dragon staff, / and one sheet of cloud hanging thick in the empty air.
The poem opens by naming the two weapons and nothing else — no fighters, no setting beyond a cloud. 如意棒, the As-You-Will rod, is named for doing what its owner wishes: it grows, shrinks and stows behind his ear. 靉靉 is a wonderfully heavy word for cloud banking up. Note the spelling: the usual written form doubles two different characters, but this edition repeats the first one instead, which is the reading given here.
It turns out the Royal Father-in-Law was a fiend all along, / who put a monster girl forward and called her a beauty.
The poem does the explaining the prose has not stopped for. 怪女, monster girl, is the queen the king was given three years ago — presented as a gift, kept as a favourite, and about to be revealed as something with a tail.
The sovereign, greedy for pleasure, took the sickness into his body, / and the fiend meant to butcher the children.
Here is the chain of cause the whole two-chapter episode has been built on, set out in fourteen characters: appetite, then illness, then a cure that requires a thousand murdered children. The poem does not soften the last step. 宰 is the word for slaughtering an animal.
Battle poems in this novel are not interruptions of the action; they are how the action is told. Prose gives you who moved where. The poem gives you what it meant, who was really in the room, and what the stakes were, at a pitch prose cannot reach without sounding hysterical.
This one has an unusual job. Most battle poems are pure spectacle — sparks, dust, weapons named twice. This one spends its middle stanza on exposition, laying out the plot of the whole Bhikṣu episode for anyone who came in late. The novel was performed in instalments, and this is what catching up sounded like.