變作蜜蜂 Changed into a Bee
孫大聖顯個神通，捻著訣，念個咒語，搖身一變，變作蜜蜂兒，真個輕巧。你看他：孙大圣显个神通，捻着诀，念个咒语，摇身一变，变作蜜蜂儿，真个轻巧。你看他：
逐句解 Line by line
The Great Sage displayed a magic power of his: he made the sign with his fingers, recited a spell, shook himself, and changed into a bee — a truly deft and dainty thing. Look at him:
捻著 is durative zhe. 蜜蜂兒 takes the retroflex suffix er. The segment carries the 你看他 tag, which is bound to the prose that precedes it and is therefore kept with it rather than with the verse.
Its wings so thin they go soft upon the wind, its waist so light it shows slender against the sun.
薄 is read báo, the concrete thinness of a physical object; the literary bó belongs to the figurative senses and to bound compounds such as 薄命 and 薄暮. The reading is proposed here and is flagged for ruling.
Its mouth is sweet, and has gone seeking the hearts of flowers; its tail is keen, and is good at bringing the toad down.
降 is xiáng, to subdue, not the jiàng of descending — the bee masters the toad rather than alighting on it. The couplet sets the bee's gentleness against its sting, which is the point of the whole transformation.
In the brewing of honey its merit is no shallow thing; attending upon the court, it is of itself modest in ceremony.
投衙 draws on the old conceit of the 蜂衙, the bee-yamen: the swarm gathering morning and evening about its queen was likened to officials presenting themselves at the magistrate's court. 衙 is yá.
And now it puts a cunning stratagem to work, and comes dancing in beneath the eaves of the gate.
The closing couplet turns the natural history of the preceding lines into narrative: every attribute catalogued above is now instrumental. No guarded graph falls in this segment.
Of the seventy-two transformations, the bee is among the smallest Pilgrim ever takes, and he takes it for the same reason each time: he needs to pass a door he has not opened. What distinguishes this instance is that the novel stops to praise the form at length. Four lines of regulated verse are spent on an insect the size of a thumbnail, and the disproportion is the joke.
The vocabulary of the verse is persistently official. The bee 投衙, presents itself at the yamen, and is 禮自謙, modest in its ceremony — the swarm about a queen having long been read as a court in miniature, with the same duties of attendance and the same decorum. Placed here the conceit is quietly barbed: Pilgrim is about to enter the household of a queen of quite another kind, and will observe none of the decorum at all.
The middle couplet does the real work. A mouth that seeks the hearts of flowers and a tail that can bring down a toad are the same creature's two ends, and the chapter to come is built on precisely that doubleness — sweetness at the front, a sting behind. It is a fair description of the bee, and a better one of the scorpion who is waiting inside; the reader is given the demon's character in a line about an insect, several pages before she opens her mouth.