這場好鬥 This Fine Bout
兩個這場好鬥：两个这场好斗：
逐句解 Line by line
A fine bout the two of them made of it:
⚠ Six graphs standing as their own unit at the close of a 362-graph line, so the tag alone opens the showcase. This is the chapter's second instance of that mechanism and the first with a descriptive rather than a formulaic tag.
Gold-hooped cudgel, wrought-iron staff — the faces changed, and no more reckoning as friends.
The line opens by naming the two weapons and nothing else, so that the combatants enter the poem as their arms. 變臉 is to change countenance, and 不以朋友論 is to cease treating one another on the footing of friends.
That one says: "It is you, ape, that I blame for the harming of my son."
⚠ The rhapsody turns to DIALOGUE here, and 那個說／這個說 alternate for four lines. Ch.60's three earlier showcases were pure description; verse carrying quoted speech is a shape the chapter has not met before. 子 is zǐ, son.
This one says: "Your honoured son has attained the Way; have done with your resentment."
得道 takes dé, attainment. The reply compresses into seven graphs the whole argument the Great Sage made at length in prose earlier in the chapter.
That one says: "Witless creature, how dare you come to my gate?"
那個 is deictic. The second exchange abandons the son entirely and moves to the trespass, exactly as the prose quarrel did.
This one says: "I have my reasons, and came expressly to ask."
相問 takes xiāng. 有因 — having a cause — is the mildest possible account of an errand that has so far produced a chase and a duel.
The one would beg the fan to guard the Tang Monk; the one will not lend the banana-leaf, and is mean beyond measure.
⚠ 要 is yào, the modal — the parse is 要 + 求扇子, would beg the fan. pypinyin reads 要求 as the compound meaning to demand and supplies yāo; the graph is unguarded, so nothing but the shift probe would have caught it. 忒 is the vernacular intensifier, excessively. The alternation drops the quotation marks here and reports both sides in the third person.
Words going and words coming lose the old affection; a whole house without right feeling, and rancour breeding in them all.
舉家 — the whole household — widens the quarrel from two men to a family, and the reader is meant to count the Rākṣasī, the Jade-Faced Princess and the Red Boy into it.
The Bull King's staff rises, outdoing a flood-dragon; the Great Sage's cudgel meets it, and gods and demons flee.
賽 is sài, to surpass in contest. The couplet returns from speech to combat and restores the strict parallel of the opening.
At first they strove and fought before the mountain; afterwards they rode the auspicious cloud together and mounted.
初時 and 後來 mark the only movement the fight has: from the ground to the air. 齊 insists that they rise together, neither driving the other up.
In mid-air they showed their divine powers; amid five-coloured light they worked their marvellous turns.
中 is zhōng. 妙運 is skilled manoeuvring — the vocabulary is of craft rather than of fury.
The two staffs ring and shake the barrier of heaven; no winning or losing is to be seen, and the two are matched within an inch.
傍 is bàng, beside. 皆傍寸 is obscure and appears to mean that neither can gain more than an inch on the other; the line is given as printed and the reading is not asserted beyond the graph's standing value.
This rhapsody does something none of the chapter's three earlier ones does: it quotes. Four consecutive lines are speeches, marked 那個說 and 這個說 and set in quotation marks inside the verse, so that the argument of the preceding prose is replayed in metre. The son, the trespass, the fan, the refusal — the same four points in the same order, each compressed to seven graphs.
The compression is the interest of it. In prose the Great Sage needed thirty-three graphs to argue that the Red Boy had been promoted rather than destroyed; in verse he needs seven. What the rhapsody supplies is not new information but the shape of the quarrel seen at once, and the shape is perfectly symmetrical: accusation, answer, accusation, answer, and then a couplet stating both positions in the third person with nothing to choose between them.
The last line is the point of the whole piece. Two staffs shake the barrier of heaven and nothing whatever is decided. Every couplet after the dialogue insists on the balance — the staff rises and the cudgel meets it, they climb together, they show their powers together — and the closing 不見輸贏 makes the deadlock explicit. The fight cannot resolve the chapter, and the novel says so in verse before saying so in prose.