“'Come, we shall have some fun now!' thought Alice.”

August 20, 2015 6:53 AM

A Mad Hatter’s Mashup Party: Reimagining Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with public domain and CC-licensed art. [Medium]

The Public Domain Review has invited a dozen Lewis Carroll experts to annotate a special version of the story with lots of fun trivia and facts about the book and its author. You’ll find their comments in the margin notes. We’ll be publishing two new annotated chapters here each week for the next six weeks.

Chapter 1: Down the Rabbit-Hole, Annotations by Zoe Jacques, illustration remixes by Anna Vignet
Chapter 2: The Pool of Tears, Annotations by Jan Susina, illustration remixes by Craig Bowers
Chapter 3: A Caucus-Race and a Long Tail, Annotations by Jenny Woolf, illustration remixes by Geoff Kim
Chapter 4: The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill, Annotations by Stephanie Lovett, illustration remixes by Anna Vignet
Chapter 5: Advice from a Caterpillar, Annotations by Kiera Vaclavik, remix illustrations by Craig Bowers
Chapter 6: Pig and Pepper, Annotations by Selwyn Goodacre, illustration remixes by Geoff Kim
Chapter 7: A Mad Tea-Party, Annotations by Franziska Kohlt, illustration remixes by Anna Vignet

Related:
- 1865 – 2015: 150 years of the Macmillan Alice [Macmillan]
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – 150th Anniversary [Lewis Carroll Resources]
- 150 Years of Alice and Wonderland [Daily Star]
- Alice in Wonderland at 150: innocent fantasy or dark and druggy? [The Telegraph]
- World artists illustrate Chinese Alice in Wonderland charity edition. [South China Morning Post]
- The Story of Alice: This study of the queasy relationship between Lewis Carroll and his beloved child muse for Alice in Wonderland gets closer to the truth than any to date. [The Guardian]

In The Story of Alice, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, an Oxford don, has explored Dodgson/Carroll and Alice through a braid of “adventures” and “explanations”. It’s a strategy that yields fascinating insights, even though both the writer and his child-muse ultimately slip through our fingers. With Carroll, the denser the documentation, the greater the enigma. Appropriately, on the cover of Sgt Pepper, he appears between Marlene Dietrich and TE Lawrence.

- The Mad Challenge of Translating "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" Explore the linguistic tricks used to make Lewis Carroll's puns, parodies and nonsense accessible in hundreds of tongues. [Smithsonian Magazine]

How do you write about the Mouse’s tale without losing the all-important pun on “tail”? Some languages, like the Aboriginal tongue Pitjantjatjara, don’t even use puns. What about when a character takes an idiom literally? The Caterpillar, for instance, tells Alice to explain herself. “I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir, because I’m not myself, you see,” Alice replies. The cultural references in this Victorian novel pose other problems. British contemporaries would have guessed that the Hatter was mad from mercury exposure, but hat makers in other parts of the world didn’t use mercury. And why translate a parody of a popular British poem for readers of Arabic who have never seen the original?

posted by Fizz (13 comments total)

The Smithsonian article on translating Alice into different languages is fascinating:

Take Carroll’s parody of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” recited at the tea party by the Hatter:

Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!
How I wonder what you’re at!
Up above the world you fly
Like a tea-tray in the sky.

Here it is back-translated from Pashto, an Afghani language:

Blink, oh, you little bat,
Tell me something about your situation because I am surprised.
Open your wings on the world,
Like a Falcon in the sky.

The Pashto translator notes that he rewrote the poem to make it rhyme properly but otherwise tried to match the original English. In other words, he faithfully rendered Carroll’s parody in Pashto despite the fact that “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” is not a traditional work in Afghanistan. This is known among translators as the foreignization strategy: the translator stays close to the original text at the risk of producing something readers will not fully understand.

posted by Fizz at 7:30 AM on August 20, 2015 [2 favorites]

An alternate strategy is to find a translation for a poem that is as faithful as possible to the mouth-sounds of the original, disregarding meaning (not to mention the intended meaning of the original). I like to think this is how Humpty-Dumpty would translate a poem.
posted by idiopath at 7:36 AM on August 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

Also this: Wonderland Emoji Poster.
posted by Fizz at 7:39 AM on August 20, 2015

The 1915 silent film version in the "Alice Goes to the Movies" section is frightening and awesome.
posted by Clustercuss at 8:53 AM on August 20, 2015

> Tell me something about your situation because I am surprised.

Coincidentally, this is my standard chat-up line. Y'know, just getting-to-know-you stuff.
posted by cardioid at 8:57 AM on August 20, 2015

An alternate strategy is to find a translation for a poem that is as faithful as possible to the mouth-sounds of the original, disregarding meaning (not to mention the intended meaning of the original).

Normally I would say no, but:

Cocillaba el día y las tovas agilimosas
giroscopaban y barrenaban en el larde.
Todos debirables estaban los burgovos,
y silbramaban las alecas rastas.

"¡Cuídate, hijo mío, del Jerigóndor,
que sus dientes muerden y sus garras agarran!
¡Cuídate del pájaro Jubjub, y huye
del frumioso zumbabadanas!"

Echó mano a su espada vorpal;
buscó largo tiempo al manxomo enemigo,
descansó junto al árbol Tumtum,
y permaneció tiempo y tiempo meditando.

Y, estando sumido en irribumdos pensamientos,
surgió, con ojos de fuego,
bafeando, el Jerigóndor del túlgido bosque,
y burbulló al llegar.

¡Zis, zas! ¡Zis, zas! ¡Una y otra vez
tajó y hendió la hoja vorpal!
Cayó sin vida, y con su cabeza,
emprendió galofante su regreso.

Translating Jabberwocky (scroll down for many different versions) is a riot.
posted by sukeban at 9:01 AM on August 20, 2015 [2 favorites]

The Annotated Alice already exists and is pretty darn good.
posted by idb at 9:09 AM on August 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

Normally I would say no, but

To be clear, I did not invent the phonetic translation. I lack the expertise from which I could argue it is appropriate, much less to describe the exact kinds of poetry for which it would be appropriate, but the concept was introduced to me by a poet and translator of poetry.
posted by idiopath at 9:14 AM on August 20, 2015

Yeah, but Jabberwocky is one of the poems for which it would be appropriate. Normally I see this style used more for song lyrics translations, however. For example, this Piano Man cover doesn't try to get even close to the lyrics more than there's an old man and a piano somewhere.
posted by sukeban at 9:26 AM on August 20, 2015

> The Smithsonian article on translating Alice into different languages is fascinating

Yes, I just wish it were longer. They might have mentioned the fact that Nabokov produced a brilliant translation into Russian when he was barely 23; his biographer, Brian Boyd, says:

In the summer of 1922 Gamayun, one of Berlin's many new Russian publishers, commissioned Sirin [Nabokov's pseudonym] to translate Alice in Wonderland into Russian. After Gamayun handed him as his advance a U.S. five-dollar bill — no mean sum by now — he took a tram home, but finding no change in his pocket, had to proffer the bill. The conductor was so impressed, he stopped the car to count out the change.

Nabokov found the translation easy work after Colas Breugnon [a novel by Romain Rolland]. To make the book a self-sufficient plaything for Russian children he staged a gleeful raid on the toys and tags of a Russian nursery: the French mouse that came over with William the Conqueror became a mouse left when Napoleon retreated, Alice became Anya, trivial puns became quadrivial. The twenty-three-year-old Nabokov's Anya v strane chudes has been rated the best translation of the book into any language.

The last sentence is a little silly—how could anyone know?—but it's a wonderful translation. (It's online, for those who read Russian.)

> An alternate strategy is to find a translation for a poem that is as faithful as possible to the mouth-sounds of the original, disregarding meaning (not to mention the intended meaning of the original). I like to think this is how Humpty-Dumpty would translate a poem.

This has been done a number of times; the most ambitious attempt I know of is Louis Zukofsky's version of Catullus. You can see a couple of short examples, paired with more traditional translations, here; there's a scholarly discussion by Andrew Eastman here and a blog post by Curtis Faville here. (The first commenter there has already asked the simple-minded question "Doesn't it matter that it becomes very hard to understand what's being said?" so we don't have to.)
posted by languagehat at 12:13 PM on August 20, 2015 [4 favorites]

Great share languagehat.

By the way, regarding the main part of the post: the public domain mashup artwork linked above is full of fun animation and beautiful imagery, well worth clicking on, even if you're not set on (re)reading Alice in Wonderland.
posted by Fizz at 1:30 PM on August 20, 2015

"Doesn't it matter that it becomes very hard to understand what's being said?"

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
posted by idiopath at 1:42 PM on August 20, 2015

The first Tenniel illustration on the Pool of Tears (Chap 2) used to give me nightmares.

I'm so glad the remix version hadn't been done at that point!
posted by Sparx at 5:13 PM on August 20, 2015