After diving into Plato, I feel like doing something lighter for this book post. I’ve started on an article on Walter Williams, but that can wait a bit. For this article, I’ll look at two translations of Alice in Wonderland which are sitting in my library. Alice is a hard book to translate, with lots of wordplay and parody verses. That hasn’t stopped translators.

Aventures d’Alice au Pays des Merveilles is the original French translation. Henri Bué translated it under Lewis Carroll’s direction, and it was published in 1869, four years after the original. The Dover edition which I have includes a 1972 introduction discussing the translation process.

Alice im Wunderland is a 1993 German translation by Siv Bublitz. It’s one of many and just happens to be the one I have. A true scholar would look at a dozen translations or more, but no one’s paying me to do this.

I can read German pretty well. I once could read French nearly as well, but I’ve fallen out of practice. a French translation of a children’s book I already know is still manageable.

The book has two tricky aspects: the wordplay and the verse parodies. Alice and other characters mangle words. While Alice is falling down the rabbit hole, she says “Antipathies” when she means “Antipodes.” The same word exists in French, so there’s no problem for Bué. The German version uses “Antipathen,” which took a little fudging. The word for “antipodes” is “Antipoden,” but the plural form of the word for “antipathy” is “Antipathien.” It’s close enough.

Shortly afterward, Alice murmurs, “Do cats eat bats?” and turns it around into “Do bats eat cats?” This doesn’t flow as well in English or German, where the words for “bat” and “cat” are very dissimilar. On the other hand, the French and German words for “bat” both use the root for “mouse,” so they get a little back.

“Curiouser and curiouser” doesn’t mistranslate well into German, which forms almost all comparatives by adding “-er” at the end. Bublitz goes with “Merkwurdiger and “Merkwurdigerer,” which could back-translate as “curiouser and curiouserer.” I don’t know what to make of the French expression, “De plus très-curieux en plus très-curieux,” but I’ll assume it’s bad grammar.

The mouse’s long tale, which is typographically presented in the form of a long tail, is a wordplay that doesn’t work in French or German, though both translations keep the typography. The French one doesn’t try to tie those two words together. Bublitz resorts to the compound “Schwanzenlang,” “tail-long,” which is reminiscent of “Stundenlang,” “hours long.”

The Mock Turtle is a problem in the modern context, since hardly anyone remembers mock turtle soup. (I just looked up what it contains and wish I hadn’t.) The German version uses the word “Suppenschildkröte,” which means “soup turtle.” It doesn’t make sense when he laments that he was once a real turtle. Isn’t a turtle for soup still a real turtle? The French translation uses “fausse-tortue,” which means “false turtle” but probably loses the wordplay.

Both translations give clever equivalents to the idea that their lessons “lessen from day to day.” In French, it becomes “nous les laissons à peu à peu” (we leave them little by little). The German one plays on “lehren” (to learn) with “weil er von Tag zu Tag leerer wird” (because it becomes emptier from day to day).

Enough of wordplay. The verses are an equally tricky problem, if not worse. Carroll parodied a number of poems that people who don’t study his works aren’t likely to know about today. Let’s go through them in order. Some of Bué’s treatments look like straightforward translations, though I could be missing some allusions. Bublitz picks some very interesting songs and poems to parody.

“How doth the little crocodile” comes from “How Doth the Little Busy Bee” by Isaac Watts. Bullwinkle once recited it in a cartoon, so some people may have heard it. The German version parodies Goethe’s “Der Fischer.” In the original, a nixie drowns a fisherman. Here, it’s a crocodile that does him in. The French one plays on a poem called “Le Corbeau et le Renard,” and there’s no close tie to the original. I could be missing something.

“You are old, Father William,” is based on a poem with the same opening line and general structure. In the original, Father William’s responses about his durability are serious, not to say pompous. The German one plays on a different poem, called “Die gar traurige Geschichte mit dem Feuerzeug” (the very sad story about the lighter). A child plays with a lighter, in spite of the cats’ warnings (I’m not making this up, you know!), and burns to death. In the parody, Palinchen makes a mess of things without dire consequences, while the cats go after the parrot. Bué translates Carroll’s verses.

Next up: The Duchess’s “Speak roughly to your little boy.” The original is a forgettable poem called “Speak Gently,” with sentiments just the opposite of the Duchess’s violent ones. Bué goes for translation again. The German verse is similar in meaning to the original but throws in an extra reference. The opening line is “Schlage dein Prinzchen, hau rein,” which plays on a famous lullaby that begins “Schlafe, mein Prinzchen, schlaf ein.” The original means “Sleep, my little prince, go to sleep.” Bué’s version means “Strike your little prince, pack a punch.”

At the Mad Hatter’s tea party, we have “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat.” The original tune is an old French song, “Ah, vous dirai-je, maman,” and Bué naturally goes back to it. The German equivalent starts with “Die Mäuse wollen Hochzeit machen” (the mice wanted to get married). A search turns up “Die Vogelhochzeit,” a song about an inter-species wedding of birds, as the original. A bat is the groom in the parody. The Dormouse murmurs the refrain, “Fidirallala, fidirallala.”

Chapter 10 piles on the parodies. “Will you walk a little faster?” gets a free translation in French which is likely an allusion to something, but I don’t know what. I don’t know what the German version is based on either.

“‘Tis the voice of the lobster” is based on something called “‘Tis the voice of the sluggard,” which sounds boring and didactic. The German version was clearly a parody of something but didn’t ring any bells. It mentioned “Eriesee” (Lake Erie), and I figured there can’t be that many German poems about Lake Erie. It didn’t take long to find the original, “John Maynard,” and — wow, that is a really good poem! The parody’s connection to it is loose. The French version translates Carroll.

Then we come to “Beautiful soup.” Bublitz goes for the completely unexpected here, parodying Cole Porter’s “Wunderbar” from Kiss Me, Kate. It even includes the bridge. Porter didn’t write the song till the 20th century, but who cares? The French version looks like a parody of something I don’t recognize.

The White Rabbit recites “They told me you had been to her” in court, causing great confusion. The French version is a straight translation. The German one parodies “Die Lorelei,” one of the most famous German poems, while working in the (obscure) meaning of Carroll’s words.

And so we come to the end. Translating humorous fantasy is fun. I’ll leave it to the experts.