On Alice's Birthday, Beaucoup de Translations

It's the 150th birthday of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, and the Wall Street Journal reminds us that the 1865 classic "is probably second only to the 17th-century allegory, 'The Pilgrim’s Progress,' as the most translated English novel."

Two Yale professors are translating “Alice” into Late Egyptian hieroglyphs. A language consultant in California is putting the finishing touches on a Kazakh translation. There is an emoji version. An edition in Scouse, the dialect of Liverpool, is with the publisher; so are ones in Cockney rhyming slang and in two Afghan languages, Dari and Pashto. The Gothic translation came out just last week.

And in August, we can expect a three-volume work that will document more than 170 translations, from Afrikaans to Zulu. More on Alice in a World of Wonderlands: The Translations of Lewis Carroll’s Masterpiece, edited by Jon A. Lindseth:

Mr. Lindseth’s book includes explanations of how different translators handled the varsity-level challenges of Chapter VII’s “A Mad Tea-Party,” including puns, parodies, non sequiturs and a riddle with no answer. At the table, Alice clashes with the officious March Hare and Mad Hatter. She struggles to engage the Dormouse who, between nodding off, makes baffling asides such as: “You know you say things are ‘much of a muchness’—did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness?’”

Joe Hale, author of the 26,000-character emoji “Wonderland,” says that while the poems and songs were no cakewalk, Carroll’s prose flowed relatively smoothly into emoji because many motifs, such as top hats and teapots, already exist in the font. To translate the Mock Turtle’s “reeling and writhing” school curriculum, Mr. Hale enlisted a fishing-pole and fish emoji, followed by a cyclone one. (See some of Mr. Hale’s emoji translations [also shown at top].)

“Alice” can now be read in Esperanto, Nepali, Slovak and the South African language Xhosa. There are editions in Braille, Shorthand and Brazilian Sign Language. The Latin translation “does real well,” said Michael Everson, a linguist and alphabetician whose Ireland-based publishing house, Evertype, has published “Alice” in at least 50 languages and a handful of alphabets. Around the year-end holidays, the Latin ‘Alice’ will sell 20 or more copies a month, he said, possibly because “grandmothers are looking for something for their grandkids who study Latin.” Schools also are customers, he said, picking up editions of “Alice” in Hawaiian and Icelandic.

So amazing. Find out more at the Wall Street Journal.