Translating the Untranslatable: Carroll, Carner and Alícia en Terra Catalana?

Josep Carner’s Catalan translation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alṍ cia en Terra de Meravelles, Ž rst appeared in 1927, some 62 years after Lewis Carroll’s original text. The relationship between these two versions differs radically from that which normally links a source text with its translation, and is too complex to Ž t happily into the category that Gérard Genette terms paratextuality (Genette 1982: 16–19). Carner’s translation is a bold fusion of faithfulness to Carroll’s text on the one hand and sheer invention on the other. As such it might be seen as paradigmatic of the difŽ culties facing the translator of any literary work, and which take on almost caricatural dimensions when applied to “nonsense” literature. The internationa l success of Alice in Wonderland, both during and especially after Carroll’s life, suggests that it has a breadth of appeal endowed with the power to transcend linguistic and cultural divides. This is especially surprising when we consider the book’s socio-cultural speciŽ city, a fact which, one might think, would pose insurmountable problems for the translator. Besides its plethora of culturally determined references in the form of poems, songs, nonsense verse, puns, and illustrations , the book  aunts itself as chronologically contingent: both in its proto-surrealist non-sequitur s and in its adaptation of contemporary songs and sayings, it is an archetypally Victorian narrative, unmistakably a product of its time and place. These factors might suggest that the original text would be impossible to translate into another language without losing either its comic features or its lexical idiosyncrasies. Bearing in mind the resistance to adaptation that these considerations imply, it is tempting to speculate to what extent this Alṍ cia en Terra de Meravelles may be considered a translation at all, and whether it might be more appropriately thought of as a literary transposition into a quite different cultural setting. A striking feature of Alṍ cia en Terra de Meravelles is its “Catalanization”. Carner’s translation retains not only the broad diegetic characteristics of the original Alice—the plot, its oneiric atmosphere, its mixture of fantastic characters and events in a conventional narrative framework—but also, to a large degree, the lexical and semantic richness of its songs, poems, puns and word-play. Curiously, a reading of the Catalan version is inevitably accompanied by the