沒輸贏 Back and Forth With No Winner
逐句解 Line by line
The old fiend of the southern hills, the vanguard under his command — all for one lump of the Tang Monk's flesh, brought to the pass of casting away death and forgetting life.
一塊肉, one lump of flesh, is the poem's coldest phrase and its most accurate. Everything on the fiends side of this battle is being risked for a portion of meat. 為 is wèi, for the sake of.
These two, over their master's life, have made an enmity of it; those two, wanting the Tang Monk, are set on it with a vicious will.
The line puts the two sides in the same frame and gives them the same grammar — these two and those two, each with a reason. It does not make them equivalent. One pair is fighting for a life and the other for a meal, and the poem lets the reader do that arithmetic without help.
Back and forth they fought through the better part of an hour, charging and colliding with no winning or losing between them.
沒輸贏, no losing or winning, is how nearly every battle rhapsody in this novel ends. The form refuses to decide — the prose has to. 沖衝撞撞 piles up two doubled words for charging and colliding, so the line itself becomes a scrum.
The set-piece closes exactly where the form requires: nobody has won. That is not a failure of nerve but a division of labour. The verse supplies the noise and the scale, and the prose that follows supplies the result.
The phrase about one lump of flesh has been waiting all chapter. Eating the Tang Monk grants long life in this book's economy, and every monster on the road knows it. Stated this baldly, in the middle of a battle, it makes the whole war sound like what it is — a scuffle over a portion.