World Poetry Translation Project

Submit Human Translation | Discuss Poem | Post Poetry | Listen McGill Live The Imaginary Iceberg by Elizabeth Bishop We'd rather have the iceberg than the ship, although it meant the end of travel. Although it stood stock-still like cloudy rock and all the sea were moving marble. We'd rather have the iceberg than the ship; we'd rather own this breathing plain of snow though the ship's sails were laid upon the sea as the snow lies undissolved upon the water. O solemn, floating field, are you aware an iceberg takes repose with you, and when it wakes may pasture on your snows? This is a scene a sailor'd give his eyes for. The ship's ignored. The iceberg rises and sinks again; its glassy pinnacles correct elliptics in the sky. This is a scene where he who treads the boards is artlessly rhetorical. The curtain is light enough to rise on finest ropes that airy twists of snow provide. The wits of these white peaks spar with the sun. Its weight the iceberg dares upon a shifting stage and stands and stares. The iceberg cuts its facets from within. Like jewelry from a grave it saves itself perpetually and adorns only itself, perhaps the snows which so surprise us lying on the sea. Good-bye, we say, good-bye, the ship steers off where waves give in to one another's waves and clouds run in a warmer sky. Icebergs behoove the soul (both being self-made from elements least visible) to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected indivisible. American Review | www.PaperLyon.com | McGill Live Radio | Publish

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Poems by Elizabeth Bishop Anaphora Argument Arrival At Santos At The Fishhouses A Miracle For Breakfast A Prodigal Cape Breton Casabianca Chemin De Fer Cirque DHiver Conversation Exchanging Hats Filling Station First Death In Nova Scotia Five Flights Up Florida Giant Snail Giant Toad Insomnia Invitation To Miss Marianne Moore In The Waiting Room Large Bad Picture Letter To NY Lines Written In The Fannie Farme Little Exercise Love Lies Sleeping Lullaby For The Cat Manners Manuelzinho North Haven One Art O Breath Poem Questions Of Travel Rain Towards Morning Roosters Sandpiper Seascape Sestina Sleeping On The Ceiling Songs For A Colored Singer Songs For A Colored SingerIA wash Sonnet 1928 Song For The Rainy Season Sonnet 1979 Squatters Children Strayed Crab The Armadillo The Bight The Burglar Of Babylon The Colder The Air The End Of March The Fish The Imaginary Iceberg The Man-Moth The Map The Monument The Moose The Shampoo The Unbeliever The Weed To Be Written On The Mirror In Wh Trouve View Of The Capitol From The Libr Visits To St Elizabeths While Someone Telephones

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Eamon Grennan	Eavan Boland	Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Lee Masters	Edith Wharton	Edmund Spenser
Edna St. Vincent Millay	Edward Fitzgerald	Edward Hirsch
Edward Lear	Edward Taylor	Edwin Brock
Edwin Morgan	EE Cummings	Eileen Myles
Elizabeth Bishop	Elizabeth Browning	Elizabeth Jennings
Ella Wheeler Wilcox	Ellen Bryant Voigt	Ellis Parker Butler
Emily Dickinson	Erica Jong	Ernest Dowson
Etheridge Knight	Ezra Pound

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