Idiomatic

 I think A.C. Graham's Poems of the Late T'ang is a landmark of a sort. It was reprinted as a New York Review of Books classic. I return constantly to this book with renewed interest. 

I do wonder about the rather unidiomatic quality of the English:

Sadness at the hairs in the mirror is new no longer,

The stains of my coat are harder to brush away.

I waste my hopes by river and lakes, a fishing rod in the hand

Which screens me from the Western sunlight as I look towards Ch'ang-an. 

Nothing says "translation" like translationese, or phrases that sound like an attempt to get at something in the original by twisting around the target language. But the twisting here has nothing to do with the original, I would hazard to guess. A lot of it is in the little words, like the and my, that aren't even in the original, and in the capricious use of singular / plural nouns.  

The first line sounds bizarre, but the second sounds normal, though we don't typically brush a stain away on clothing.

 The translator wants to avoid the first person pronoun in the first line, but not in the second. Why? The idea seems to be that, looking in the mirror, I'm no longer surprised by the white hair of the man I see there. Why is the word hair in the plural? (Chinese doesn't have number in nouns.) Why "river and lakes" instead of "river and lakes"?  Is there just one river and multiple lakes? That seems oddly specific. Why "the hand" rather than "my hand" or 'in hand"?  I have a hard time picturing how a fishing rod, typically a thin object, can shade one's eyes from the bright sunset. The verb screen suggests an object of a different shape. "I waste my hopes" is not horrible, but not particularly idiomatic either.  

There is no consistent voice that emerges, no consistency in stylistic choices.