Übersetzer und Dramaturg
Geboren 1951 in Nijmegen. Lebt in Mountcharles, County Donegal, Irland.
Marcel Otten was born in a provincial town in the Netherlands near the German border in 1951. In his home-town he went to university, where he studied Dutch, English, Philosophy and Old-Icelandic. He finished his studies at the University of Amsterdam at the Drama-department with a M.A.-degree. After that he worked at several German and Dutch theatres as a literary adviser before he started his career as a free-lance translator and adaptor of theatre-plays. Up till now he has translated / adapted about 100 plays from German, English and French into Dutch. On the Irish front he translated / adapted plays by J.M. Synge (In the Shadow of the Glen and Riders to the Sea), Anne Devlin, Hilary Fannin, Brian Friel (Molly Sweeney), Conor McPherson, Mary Jones (Stones in his Pocket), Enda Walsh (Disco Pigs) and Eugene O’Brien (Eden). Marcel Otten was the first translator who revolutionised the art of theatre-translations by adapting the original settings of a lot of plays into a Dutch environment, like Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet, the plays of Steven Berkoff, Stones in his Pocket and Disco Pigs. His version of A Clockwork Orange was an orgy of linguistic violence. Together with the actors he wrote a play about telephone-sex which was subsequently made into a much acclaimed film by the recently murdered filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Marcel Otten published two volumes of translations of Heiner Müller. The last few years he has translated 5 novels of the Icelandic Nobel Prize Winner Halldór Laxness and from the Old Icelandic about 10 saga’s and the Edda.
Marcel Otten has always been a restless soul. He has lived in London, East-Berlin, in West Germany, in Antwerp and in Reykjavik. Since 2000 he has settled down with his family in Mountcharles, County Donegal. All his life he has travelled extensively: in the sixties mainly in Ireland, England and Scotland, in the seventies in many communist countries like the German Democratic Republic, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Hungary. After a visit to Indonesia his appetite for foreign countries became insatiable. He travelled around in Thailand, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Iraq, Singapore, Tunisia, the USA, Canada, Hong Kong, China, Egypt, Israel, India and most of those countries he visited more than once. In Western Europe he travelled through all the countries, as well as entire Scandinavia. On these travels he developed his skills for photography and his first exhibition Going around the Globe is an initial account of these travels.