A variety of styles have been used in efforts to translate Du Fu 's work into English . As Burton Watson remarks in The Selected Poems of Du Fu , " There are many different ways to approach the problems involved in translating Du Fu , which is why we need as many different translations as possible " ( p. xxii ) . The translators have had to contend with bringing out the formal constraints of the original without sounding laboured to a Western ear ( particularly when translating regulated verse , or lǜshi ) , and accommodating the complex allusions contained particularly in the later works ( Hawkes writes that " his poems do not as a rule come through very well in translation " — p. ix ) . One extreme on each issue is represented by Kenneth Rexroth 's One Hundred Poems From the Chinese . His are free translations , which seek to conceal the parallelisms through enjambement and expansion and contraction of the content ; his responses to the allusions are firstly to omit most of these poems from his selection , and secondly to " translate out " the references in those works which he does select .