“Barbaric Yawp” in Dutch

The article presents two most important translations of Whitman’s line in Dutch. The first one comes from Natuurleven (“Natural life”), the selection of poems that Maurits Wagenvoort translated into Dutch in 1898; the second one was taken from the first complete edition of Leaves of Grass in Dutch which came out in 2005 under the title Grasbladen (“Leaves of Grass”). Both of them present very different interpretations of Whitman’s poetry: while the too literal and too vague translation in the collective project of Grasbladen presents a “postmodern attitude” to Whitman’s work, Wagenvoort’s translation is a subtle attempt of expressing the natural character of homosexuality and Whitman’s vision of love. The essay ends up with the new translation that Jakib Veenbaas published in 2007.