Alice's Code: How to Understand a Famous Fairy Tale If You Are Not an Oxford Graduate

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

- such a response to the fairy tale by Lewis Carroll appeared in 1879 in Russia in the magazine "People's and Children's Library". In the first translation into Russian, the book was called "Sonya in the kingdom of the diva." I must say that until now a fairy tale, an essential part of which is mathematical, linguistic, philosophical jokes, parodies and allusions, is not always clear to readers.

The first reviews of the fairy tale in England were also negative. A review that appeared in 1865, months after the book's release, described the story as one that would make a child more bewildered than joyful. Recognition came to Carroll only ten years later. But since then it seems that the popularity of the book has been growing incessantly. Probably, today readers and viewers are much more ready for the perception of the absurd than the neat and prim inhabitants of 19th century England. But, unfortunately, most of the jokes and parodies are no longer very clear to us today, since they were based on English-language material, and often on local rumors, stories and legends.

Already in the first chapter, during a long flight, bored Alice asks quite serious questions hidden behind childish spontaneity. For example, a distorted phrase about mice (midges) and cats, according to the researchers, she plays in logical positivism:. And trying to remember the multiplication table, it gets confused: Mathematicians are sure that their colleague, Charles Dodgson, who wrote this tale under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, just changed the number system several times for a joke. In the 18-ary system, 4 by 5 really equals 12, and in the base 21 system, if 4 is multiplied by 6, you get 13. Although linguists answer that if you mix up the similar sounding English words twenty ("twenty") and twelve ("Twelve"), you get the same result.

Most of the characters who meet the girl in fairyland had real-life characters in Victorian England. It could be not necessarily a specific historical person, but some concept or common joke. Many of them were associated with Oxford, which was an important milestone in Carroll's life.

Hatter

To convey the originality of this character, understandable to all Englishmen thanks to the proverb, in the Russian version he is sometimes called the "Hatter". The well-known fact that mercury was used to process felt earlier, and harmful vapors could really cloud the minds of the people of this profession, is sometimes refuted by historians today. There are three contenders for the prototype of this character: Theophilus Carter, who studied at the same college at Oxford University as Carroll, and was a real "mad inventor"; Roger Crab is a Chesham hatter who was "weird" because of a head injury from his youth in the military, and James Banning is the owner of the famous hat workshop in London, whose descendants still serve the English royal family. His great-great-grandson still shows a photograph of his famous ancestor, who, by the way, made hats for Carroll himself.

March Hare

Another not entirely normal character who appeared in a fairy tale from a saying:. The fact is that hares in the spring, during the mating season, often jump like abnormal ones, which is reflected in the English language. For us, the same figurative, but only with a different semantic connotation, is the expression.

Sonya

The choice of this participant in the "crazy tea drinking" is not entirely clear to modern children, but in the young Englishmen in the 19th century he evoked the same associations with cute pets as modern hamsters. The English dormouse is a small rodent that lives in a tree. In the 19th century, they were often kept in houses, and it was fashionable to arrange houses for these pets in old teapots. Children made their nests out of straw, and the cute animals, fully justifying their name, slept there safely during the winter and all other sunny days, since dormouse are nocturnal animals.

Cheshire Cat

There was a popular saying in England during the creation of the book. By the way, the author was also a native of the county of Cheshire, so, perhaps, he warmed his "fellow countryman" on the pages of a fairy tale. How to explain this expression, the British themselves do not know for sure: either in Cheshire they often painted grinning lions and leopards on the signs of taverns, which were then “crushed”, or they once gave the famous Cheshire cheeses the appearance of smiling cats. When young Dodgson arrived in Oxford, there was just a discussion about the origin of this saying, so the topic was fashionable in those years. But the ability to disappear Carroll's cat acquired, probably from the ghost of the Congleton cat. This favorite of one of the abbeys in Cheshire once returned home after a party … in the form of a ghost, and disappeared as soon as the door was opened for him. This ghost was very popular at that time; hundreds of people allegedly saw him at different times. By the way, the phrase of the tailed philosopher: according to researchers, it is one of the most cited today.

Griffin and Turtle Quasi

The mythical creature with the head of an eagle and the body of a lion tells Alice that he received a "classical education" - he played classics with his teacher all day, and the second, no less fantastic, with the body of a turtle, a calf's head, tail and hooves, has as a name a prefix that is understandable to all people with higher education. The Latin word - "ostensibly", "as if" is used to give words the meaning of "fake", "fictional" - the words "quasi-scientific" and "quasi-scientific" therefore have a slightly derogatory meaning. As for the turtle, the author's irony becomes clear when you learn that imitation of turtle soup, which was cooked from veal, was popular in England in those years. The queen in the fairy tale just says that quasi-turtle soup is made from this character. Together, the Griffin and the constantly crying Turtle Quasi are a caricature of sentimental graduates of Oxford.

Dodo bird

Another not very clear character in which the author encrypted himself. It is known that Carroll stuttered a little, and when he pronounced his real name, he succeeded.

Poems and songs

More than a dozen different poems are heard in the fairy tale, most of which are parodies of "soul-saving" works that were very popular in their time. For children of the 19th century, exhausted by lectures and moralizing, these funny alterations were supposed to cause unrestrained laughter. For example, "How the little crocodile cherishes his tail …" parodies the work of the English theologian and author of hymns, Isaac Watts "Against Idleness and Pranks" from the collection "Divine Songs for Children", and the first stanza of the verse "This is the voice of Omar …" evokes associations with the biblical the expression "Voice of a turtle dove". The latter similarity even sparked a scandal: a vicar from Essex published an article in a newspaper in which he accused Carroll of blasphemy.

All researchers of the famous fairy tale note its main feature - one of the main "characters" in it is the English language itself, which behaves no less crazy than all the other characters. Because of this, Alice's translators face enormous challenges. You can truly convey all the humor of the famous work only by "translating" it into similar local material, using poems, songs and jokes that are popular in this country and at this time, but at the same time the very spirit of Victorian England will be irretrievably lost.