It starts, of course, with the poem.
Jabberwocky, by Lewis Carroll.
I first read it a long time ago (my age was in the single digit range). The mirror-imaged-printed first verse delighted me; it was like magic that the words resolved themselves into readable text when held up to the mirror. As for the content of the poem, it was the coined, made up, nonsense words that made the poem stick in my mind. ("'It seems very pretty, ... but it's rather hard to understand! ... Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas -- only I don't exactly know what they are!'")
It always was (and still is) a favourite poem of mine, though I never bothered much with it except for the occasional rereading. Then one day, many years later, I came across a translation of it (unusually, not in Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice nor in Douglas Hofstater's Godel, Escher, Bach), and though I did not understand the language, could pick out the key words in the translated version.
The idea of translating Jabberwocky intrigued me. How would the translator handle Carroll's made-up words? How to make the translated words fill the reader's head with ideas--and would they be the same types of ideas as the original words filled readers' heads with?
The rest of the story is predictable. I started collecting whatever I could find, then when the Web became widely used and read, put them onto a page. I decided to include various parodies of the poem I came across as well, finding them very amusing, as well as other Jabberwocky-related pieces of writing. Rather nervously, I submitted the URL of my pages to several search engines/Webpage indexes. The email started coming in very soon. Quite a few other people had translations I didn't, and they happily sent them to me.
The response, while not really overwhelming, has been enough to make my little hobby-site grow to over 20 times its original size. Many hours of my time have been spent HTMLizing contributions and adding them to what was already there. (There aren't enough hours in the day!)
But enough of me babbling. Onward.
- the jabberwocky variations:
- [ introduction | translations | parodies | acknowledgements ]
email keith: keithlim@pobox.com