The Seafarer
A man who has kept the night watch at the prow with his feet bound in frost sets his hardship against the comfortable life of the landsman who cannot imagine it, then admits that his mind goes out over the whale's road anyway and comes back hungry for it. Halfway through, the voyage stops being a voyage and becomes the soul's passage, without the voice changing at all. Ezra Pound's 1911 version made it a founding document of modernist translation.
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Closest analogues
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