Continuing on from my previous post about the German translation, I turn now to another translation that wasn’t based on the published text of IT, but on an earlier draft version: the Dutch translation HET. Het was published in October 1986, just one month after the UK and US first editions. As with the German ES, the same issue of timing presents itself here—how was the translation work done in so little time, if King himself only finished the novel on 28 December 1985, as it says at the back of the book?

ES and HET are similar in that they were both translated from photocopies of drafts, but different in an interesting way: ES made use of King’s first draft, while HET started from King’s second draft. In both cases the translators did a quick update of their texts after the arrival on their desks of a copy of the unedited third draft text in early 1986. While it was presumed that the German translator had abridged IT in her translation, the text is actually a faithful and complete translation of the first draft, which happened to be significantly shorter than the published text; but in the case of HET the translator did drastically abridge the text of the second draft, cutting it by about half. So much so that one Dutch-language reviewer at the time called HET “the rape of Stephen King”.

It is a truth universally acknowledged by Stephen King collectors that the US/UK trade editions were not the “World First Edition” of IT (publication date: 15 September 1986), that honor went to the famous German “Bootleg” limited edition of ES by Edition Phantasia which was shipped out in May 1986. On the last page of IT, King wrote the date on which he finished the novel, 28 December 1985. You might ask yourself: how can anyone translate a 1000+ page novel into another language in just two or three months? The answer is simple: you can’t—not even with German efficiency. The fact is that the German translation that was published that May was a translation of the first draft of IT, instead of King’s third and final draft, which he finished in late December 1985—a text which underwent even more changes during the editing and proofing process at Viking in the first months of 1986.