‘Alice in a World of Wonderlands: The Translations of Lewis Carroll’s Masterpiece’

“Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!
How I wonder what you’re at!”
—Lewis Carroll, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”

There have been so many commemorations of the 150th anniversary of Lewis Carroll’s classic, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” that plummeting down a rabbit hole might now seem as commonplace as “Twinkle, twinkle, little star,” even when twisted into nonsense by the Mad Hatter: “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat! / How I wonder what you’re at!” But at the Grolier Club, in a disarmingly charming exhibition, Carroll’s world of logically shaped illogic takes a remarkable new turn. It isn’t Alice but “Alice” that falls down the rabbit hole here. The book is the character in this exhibition’s narrative, tumbling into an intricate world of challenging peculiarity.

Despite the fact that “Alice” plays with puns and popular poems, English customs and Victorian ideas—which once led friends to tell Carroll the book was “untranslatable”—such insurmountable difficulties have instead inspired a stubborn obsession. “Alice” has become the most translated English novel since “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” And the exhibition, “Alice in a World of Wonderlands: The Translations of Lewis Carroll’s Masterpiece,“ is an example of that obsession. Its curator, Jon A. Lindseth, has been collecting translations just as the original Alice— Alice Liddell Hargreaves—did in her adulthood, gathering accounts of her adventures in Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Pitman Shorthand, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish and Swedish.ENLARGE

‘Alice’ translation in Greek. PHOTO: ALEX A. BLUM, ATLANTIS-M. PECHLIVANIDIS

Twinkle, twinkle, oh my little bat!
What are you doing in the grey evening?
—rendering of a French translation