Translating Mourning: Voice, Repetition, and the Dead Body in Chinese Versions of Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!”

Abstract

Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” poses a distinctive challenge to translators because its grief is expressed not only through propositional meaning but also through apostrophe, repetition, syntactic fragmentation, bodily imagery, and the tension between public celebration and private mourning. This paper offers a close reading of the Chinese version reproduced in the supplied edition of Huiteman Shixuan (Selected Poems of Whitman), hereafter the target version, while comparing it with the verified translations of Chu Tunan, Tu An, Jiang Feng, and Zhao Luorui. The discussion focuses on three interrelated problems: the translation of Whitman’s apostrophic “O” through Chinese particles; the treatment of repetition and fragmentary speech at moments when grief approaches linguistic breakdown; and the representation of the Captain’s dead body through blood, touch, coldness, pulse, and the naming or avoidance of death. I argue that the target version creates an unusually audible, emotionally explicit Chinese voice. Its particles and syntactic expansions enhance oral immediacy and recitability, but sometimes reduce the restraint, fragmentation, and physical shock of Whitman’s elegy. Comparison among the Chinese versions shows that translating mourning is therefore not merely a matter of lexical equivalence: it is a reconstruction of how another language calls, repeats, falls silent, touches the dead, and negotiates the finality of loss.