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I love this book so much. This is the first book where I identified strongly with the main character. My mother read it to me when I was quite small, probably not more than four. I was a rather quiet child, and when my sister always looked very happy or very angry on the photos of our childhood, I always look rather grave. I had to ask my Mum if I was as dour as I look, but she said I wasn’t, I was just prone to think about things. And I found the world just as confusing as Alice found Wonderland. At four I had realised you were expected to behave, but that the code for behaviour changed. What was fine at home, was not fine with my parental grandparents, and so on. And I was still small enough to find the concept of magic quite natural, and that it would be perfectly possible to fall down a rabbit hole, or walk through a mirror. I remember staring into mirrors, trying to see a little beyond, to see if everything really was mirror images, or if there were anything which wasn’t. I felt i understood Alice very well, and I found it a comfort in her navigating Wonderland, despite how unpredictable it was. Just a few years ago my Mum confessed she really dislike this book, for exactly the same reasons I love it for. But she still read it to me several times, because I loved it so much.
“My” Alice, is not the classic Tenniel Alice, or Disney’s Alice. Mine was, by necessity, a Swedish translation. I’ve read other Swedish translation, and they usually translate all the poetry verbatim, making them only a little better than gibberish. I suspect an English-speaking child of today may not know the sources Carroll used, but to a Swedish child they are definitely unknown. My translation used well-known Swedish songs and poems instead, making it much easier for me to relate to them. And, my copy had these really wonderful illustration by Tove Jansson. She is famous for her Moomin books, but she sometimes illustrated other authors as well. Her Alice is a grave child, and Wonderland is a bit lonely, forever shaping them so in my mind.
And a fun fact: Wonder in Swedish is “under”, but that’s a word with a double meaning, it also means underneath. And that is how I read it, Alice in the land underneath, which is true too. It wasn’t until I read it in English in my teens I realised it was supposed to be a land of wonders.
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Date: 2017-03-17 05:13 pm (UTC)My parents read Wonderland and Looking-Glass aloud to me as well, and I've always been a fan. I wrote a dissertation chapter on Alice, even, and have a bookcase that's entirely for various illustrated editions and related works!
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Date: 2017-03-22 02:23 pm (UTC)I didn't came across Looking-Glass until several years later, so I don't have the same relationship to it.