To Yawp, Or Not To Yawp: French Translators and Whitman’s Distinctive Idiom

The French editions of Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” have had from the start to contend with two difficulties—the “yawp” and the choice between a static or a more dynamic rendering of the poet’s cry. From the trail-blazing Bazalgette text (1909) to the latest Darras volume (2002), the history of Whitman’s signature line in France maps the route travelled by the various translators on the way to appropriate a poetic idiom that turns out to be not so “untranslatable” after all.