Poem: Ballad of the War Carts

From a cool page with recitals and illustrations of the poem.

The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry, edited and with translations mostly by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping, has an inspiring version of Du Fu's "Ballad of the War Wagons" 兵车行. Using the "highlight" function of the Kindle edition, I copied out Barnstone and Chou's text, as follows:

Ballad of the War Wagons

Carts grumble and rattle
and horses whinny and neigh
as the conscripts pass, bows and quivers strapped to their waists.
Parents, wives, and children run to see them off
till dust clouds drown the bridge south of Changan.
Tugging at soldiers' clothes, they wail and throw themselves in the
way, their cries rising into the clouds.

On the roadside a passerby asks what's happening.
The soldiers only say, “We're called up often,
some went north at fifteen to guard the Yellow River
and still at forty are farming frontier settlements out West.
We left so young the village chief wrapped our turbans for us;
we came back white haired but now we're off to fortify the frontier!

The men there have shed a salt ocean of blood,
but the warlike emperor still lusts for empire.

My lord, haven't you heard how in two hundred districts east of
China's mountains countless villages grow just weeds and thorns?
Even if a stout wife tries to plow and hoe,
east to west the crops grow wild over broken terraces.
The Qin soldiers are fierce warriors,
but they are driven forth to battle like chickens or dogs.

You, sir, can ask questions
but conscripts don't dare complain.
This winter, for example,
they haven't released the Guanxi troops
but officials still press for the land tax.
Land taxes! How are we to pay that?
The truth is it's a sour thing to have sons.
Better to have a daughter—
at least she can marry a neighbor.
Our sons lie unburied in the grass.
My lord, have you seen the
Blue Sea's shore where the old white bones lie ungathered?
New ghosts keen and old ghosts weep
jiu, jiu like twittering birds as rain sifts from the bleak sky.”

(I later found that the Mac Kindle App has a "copy" function, so my work was mostly unnecessary. Oh well.) Then I looked up the text on Google and copied it from the Baidu page: 

兵车行

车辚辚，马萧萧，行人弓箭各在腰。

耶娘妻子走相送（也作“爷娘”），尘埃不见咸阳桥。

牵衣顿足拦道哭，哭声直上干云霄。

道旁过者问行人，行人但云点行频。

或从十五北防河，便至四十西营田。

去时里正与裹头，归来头白还戍边。

边庭流血成海水，武皇开边意未已。

君不闻汉家山东二百州，千村万落生荆杞。

纵有健妇把锄犁，禾生陇亩无东西。

况复秦兵耐苦战，被驱不异犬与鸡。

长者虽有问，役夫敢申恨？

且如今年冬，未休关西卒。

县官急索租，租税从何出？

信知生男恶，反是生女好。

生女犹得嫁比邻，生男埋没随百草。

君不见青海头，古来白骨无人收。

新鬼烦冤旧鬼哭，天阴雨湿声啾啾。

I'm obsessed with optimizing this task to: 

• Compare the original and the translation and so learn about how the translation was done.
• Produce an eBook containing the Chinese texts of the poems -- then I can have Chinese poems I've studied on my phone!