Translating Revolutionary Road

This year I had the pleasure of working with award-winning Dutch actor Jacob Derwig on the translation of his marvellous play Revolutionary Road, based on the classic American novel by Richard Yates. The fact that Yates's novel was originally written in English and Jacob's stage adaptation of it was written in Dutch made for a fascinating literary translation process. In some ways, the project was a kind of back-translation—taking Jacob's excellent Dutch stage adaptation of Yates's prose and converting it "back" into Yatesian English while still staying true to the playwright's vision.

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