A biographer of Wilde, Owen Dudley Edwards, comments that the play "is apparently untranslatable into English", citing attempts made by Lord Alfred Douglas, Aubrey Beardsley, Wilde himself revising Douglas's botched effort, Wilde's son Vyvyan Holland, Jon Pope, Steven Berkoff and others, and concluding "it demands reading and performance in French to make its impact".[1] The most familiar English version is by Douglas, extensively revised by Wilde, originally published in 1894. Wilde dedicated the first edition "To my friend Lord Alfred Douglas, the translator of my play".[16] It was lavishly produced, with illustrations by Beardsley that Wilde thought over-sophisticated.[17][n 6] An American edition, with the Beardsley illustrations, was published in San Francisco in 1896.[19] In the 1890s and 1900s translations were published in at least eleven other languages, from Dutch in 1893 to Yiddish in 1909.[n 7]
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