鼠老成精 An Old Rat Turned Spirit
逐句解 Line by line
She has no fear of the sword of Lei Huan, nor any fear of the blade of Lü Qian.
Two famous weapons of Chinese story: Lei Huan found a pair of swords by reading the stars, and Lü Qian owned a blade said to make its bearer a great minister. Both are named as things that would frighten an ordinary spirit.
Coming and going as she pleases, she lets the waters run wide as the Yangtze and the Han;
往往來來, the verbs doubled and paired, gives the sense of easy repeated movement. The point is that no river can stop her.
up and down as she pleases, what does she care how high Mount Tai and Mount Heng may rear?
那 is nǎ here, the question word doing rhetorical work — what does it matter to her — rather than pointing at anything. Tai and Heng are two of the five sacred peaks.
Look at her, with a face like the moon and flowers and every charm about her — and who would know her for an old rat turned spirit, putting on a show of daring?
得 in the word for recognise is dé, the band after a verb of perceiving. And here is the answer to the riddle at last: a rat.
The answer arrives in the final line, and the verse has been fair with us throughout — the gold nose, the white fur, the earthen passage, the indifference to rivers and mountains. Everything pointed to a burrowing animal.
The pairing in the last line is the whole point. A face like the moon and flowers, and an old rat. This novel returns constantly to the gap between what a thing looks like and what it is, and the monks two dozen passages ago said plainly that they could not tell one from the other.
The two named blades are a nice touch of learning. Both belong to well-known stories about swords with destinies attached, and the verse invokes them only to say that none of it would impress her.