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The book of disquiet

The Book of Disquiet is my adaptation and translation of the Fernando Pessoa novel Livro do Desassossego, performed in a three-week run at the Blue Elephant Theatre, London in 2011. The play has since been performed in Portugal and Brazil, translated into Swedish and adapted for the cinema. The adaptation engages in a high degree of formal experimentation and seeks to push the boundaries of what is possible in translation while blurring the lines between the translation/adaptation binary. This practical exploration informs much of my critical writing about translation and adaptation, which has been published elsewhere and which conceptualises translation using the metaphor of ‘jazz’, and the idea of being (following the 2003 film) ‘lost’ in translation. As such, a wider discussion of the adaptation process between not only languages but also cultures and media emerges, which has been a central focus in my critical scholarship. This project represents one example of my practice as a translator for organisations such as the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Court Theatre. The process of developing this particular translation was explored in a conference paper presented at the IFTR 2010 (Munich) and the article ‘Rewriting the Book of Disquiet’ in a special issue of the language and linguistics journal Word and Text. My conceptualisation of translation using the metaphor of jazz is published in the Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance.