Watson Burton (translator). The Selected Poems of Du Fu

New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. — 173 p.The Chinese scholar William Hung, who wrote the definitive book in English on Du Fu’s life and poetry, gave it the unequivocal title Tu Fu: China’s greatest poet. Professor Stephen Owen of Harvard, the leading American authority on Chinese poetry of the Tang period, enthusiastically seconds Hung’s estimation of Du Fu. And the American poet and translator Kenneth Rexroth, who rendered some of Du Fu’s poems in English, goes a step further to declare him "the greatest non-epic, non-dramatic poet who has survived in any language." The aim of the present volume is neither to question nor to confirm these judgments, but simply to present a selection of Du Fu’s works in translation.