朱簾上鉤 The Shrimp Whisker Blind
逐句解 Line by line
quiet lodges round about, courtyards full of crab-apple with powder-winged butterflies flying.
The last of the matched pairs before the catalogue of buildings begins. 海棠 is the flowering crab-apple, one of the most painted plants in Chinese art, and 粉蝶 is the cabbage white.
Look further at the Fragrance-Gathering Lodge, the Green-Moth Lodge, the Hangover-Cure Lodge and the Longing Lodge — tier upon tier reflected, the vermilion blinds hooked up and holding their shrimp-whisker fringe; and see too the Sour-Nurture Pavilion, the Plain-Robe Pavilion, the Brow-Painting Pavilion and the Four-Rains Pavilion — each of them lofty, with bird script written on the ornamented boards.
Fifty-two characters, the longest verse line in the chapter, and it holds the chapter's one true astral character. 𣽹 is read xiā here — the shrimp. The word is the shrimp-whisker blind, the standard poetic name for a fine split-bamboo screen, and the novel itself uses it plainly in chapter sixty, where the shrimp-whisker blind hangs in the Dragon King's corridor beside a screen written in bird script, exactly as here. The character on this page is not the ordinary one for the shrimp: it is a rare form found nowhere else in the whole of the novel or in any dictionary, and by its own shape it would be the vernacular character for mire. It stands where a near-identical garden rhapsody in the late-Ming novel Taowu Xianping writes the ordinary shrimp, so the text is kept as printed and read as the word. 鳥篆 is bird script, the ornamental old writing whose strokes end in birds' heads — unreadable at a glance, which is the point of using it on a signboard.
The four lodges are named for what happens in them, and the names run downhill in a very deliberate order: gathering fragrance, green moths, curing a hangover, and longing. This is a pleasure garden, and by the fourth name it has stopped pretending otherwise.
The blinds are the detail that has caused this chapter's one real textual difficulty. The shrimp-whisker blind is an old and lovely image — split bamboo hanging in fine strands like the long whiskers of a shrimp — and Tang poets used it constantly. What the 1592 text prints at that spot is a character that appears nowhere else in Chinese literature and that no dictionary gives a sound for.
The line also rhymes with chapter sixty in a way that settles the reading. There, in the dragon's undersea hall, bird script stands on the screens and the shrimp-whisker blind hangs in the corridor — the same two images, the same order, the ordinary character. The author had a stock description and used it twice.