Mereie de Jong

I'm a self-employed translator from the Netherlands with a keen interest in literature. My regular translation jobs are related to scholarly research topics from the humanities and the social sciences, but I recently added literature to my list of activities. In 2018, I contributed sixteen new Dutch translations of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke to a project in tribute to this renowned author. The publication received a favourable review in the Dutch daily newspaper 'de Volkskrant'. For a similar project about Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’, I made a new Dutch translation of this poetic masterpiece and provided English translations of several Dutch poems (by various authors) inspired by ‘The Raven’. Subsequently, I translated poems by Paul Verlaine (published 2020), Giorgio Baffo (2021), Charles Baudelaire (2022), Gaspara Stampa (2023) and Friedrich Hölderlin (2024). Currently, I'm working on a selection of poems and prose excerpts by Gabriele d'Annunzio. As a rule, I translate from Dutch to English and vice versa, but as shown above, I don't shy away from the occasional detour to other languages. In addition, I have come to write poems of my own, thereby preferring traditional forms with a ‘rock ’n roll, if not in-your-face’ content. My favourite poets include Philip Larkin and Menno Wigman.