This post contains excerpts from the WSJ article, which emphasizes Alice translations, including a preview of the ground-breaking three volume set, Alice in a World of Wonderlands.
“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” Lewis Carroll’s 1865 classic about a pert girl in a pinafore who falls down a rabbit hole into a magical and menacing underground world, is marking its 150th anniversary with new translations. She is Alis (in Yiddish), or Alisi (in Tongan) or Anya (in Russian), and, despite her advanced age, to readers everywhere she remains a curious youngster whose adventures have never gone out of print.
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.
Alice in a World of Wonderlands
Lewis Carroll’s 1865 classic ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,’ is probably second only to the 17th-century allegory, ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress,’ as the most translated English novel. A three-volume work documents more than 170 translations, from Afrikaans to Zulu.
