雲霧籠峰頂 Mist Caps the Summit
但見那山：但见那山：
逐句解 Line by line
And this was the mountain they saw:
Four characters meaning "stop the story, here comes the scenery." Every rhapsody in the book is introduced by some version of this.
Cloud and mist cap the summit, / a rushing spring wells in the gorge.
潺湲 is the sound of water moving — a pair of syllables that rhyme with each other and mean nothing apart, like "hurly-burly." Chinese verse is full of them and they are almost always about water, wind or birds.
A hundred flowers scent the whole road, / ten thousand trees stand close in their thickets.
The hundred and the ten thousand are not counts but sizes, used the way English says "a thousand and one." The doubled 叢叢 at the end thickens the thicket by saying it twice.
Plum green and plum-blossom white, / willow green and peach red.
Four colours in eight characters. The line pairs 梅 and 李, then 柳 and 桃 — two fruit trees, two flowering ones, balanced against each other the way a matched couplet on a doorway is.
Where the cuckoo cries, spring is nearly over; / the purple swallows twitter, and the spring rites are done.
The cuckoo and the swallow are the calendar. 社 is the festival of the god of the soil, held soon after the spring equinox, so a swallow saying the rites are finished is a bird telling you the date. 呢喃 is the twittering itself, a matched pair of sounds like 潺湲 two lines above.
This is a rhapsody, the set-piece landscape description that the novel produces whenever the party arrives somewhere. The convention works rather like an establishing shot: the narrative stops, the camera pans, and nobody does anything for eight lines.
The trick of it is that the mountain is entirely generic and entirely specific at once. Cloud on the summit, water in the gorge, flowers on the road — no reader could pick this mountain out of a line-up. But the cuckoo and the swallow date it precisely to the very end of spring, which is exactly where the prose left off five passages ago with winter's remnant and spring exhausted.
Chapter 80 carries four of these landscape rhapsodies, and they are doing structural work: mountain, then black wood, then ruined temple, then the rebuilt temple behind it. The chapter is a series of places, and the verse is how it announces each one.