“Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman (post 7): Profs. Folsom and Merrill, University of Iowa, and the difficulty in translating Whitman’s contradictions.

“Untranslatable”

In 2014, Profs. Folsom and Merrill started an international online course focusing on Song of Myself. They made it available in fifteen languages, even though it is “a particularly challenging poem to translate” (1, p. 5). So in the poem’s concluding Section 52, when Whitman says he is “untranslatable” (1, p. 183), the professors interpret him to mean that he is difficult to translate from one language to another.

However, I interpret Whitman’s “untranslatable” as meaning he is hard to understand as a person, as Whitman explains nine lines later, when he says, “You will hardly know who I am or what I mean” (Section 52) (1, p. 183). Indeed, Whitman had previously used “translate” in the latter sense in Section 47: “And I swear I will never translate myself at all, only to him or her who privately stays with me in the open air. If you would understand me go to the heights or water-shore” (1, p. 166).

“You” as Alternate Personality

See my previous post, in which I interpreted “you” in the poem’s opening lines as being an alternate personality.

Another example of “you” as an alternate personality is found in the opening lines of Section 5 (1, p. 20), where “you” is “the other I am”:

“I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,

And you must not be abased to the other.”

Contradictions of Multiple Personality

In Section 16, which begins “I am old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,” Whitman goes on to make a long list of different and contrasting attributes, and of diverse people from many places and walks of life. What did he mean by this? That he is ecumenical? On the contrary. As he explains: “I resist anything better than my own diversity” (1, p. 55), which prepares the reader to understand Whitman’s most famous lines:

“Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)” [1, p. 180, Section 51].

Whitman thus reiterates his own internal diversity—translated into psychological terms, his multiple personality—which is famous for the way such a person may contradict himself, because his alternate personalities are diverse, and tend to disagree with each other.

In conclusion, Song of Myself, a long, complicated poem, can support various interpretations, mine included.

1. Walt Whitman. Song of Myself [1881]. Introduction and commentary by Ed Folsom and Christopher Merrill. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2016.