Subject: RE: Rabbity Sand-Laugher

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2001 15:01:46 EDT

I want to make it clear that I think finding that phrase was remarkably 
clever. It can't be easy to find that close a match in a language which is 
designed to be uniquely decomposable. I deserves some kind of medal. What 
it does not deserve is to be called a good pun (oxymoron or no). The name, 
unlike that in the original, is unmotivated and so does not fit in. And I 
don't see how to motivate it within the story, even sensibly modified. 
My objection to this -- and the whole Alice translation project -- is not to 
the quality. That it is not very good is inevitable, and so not worth 
objecting to. My complaint is about the fact that it is done at all. I have 
often commented on the oddity of people taking up "the logical language" and 
then bitching about the logic. I find a similar kind of perversity in taking 
up a language without a literary tradition -- let alone one for children 
("bad poems for good children") -- or an underlying culture and then trying 
to translate into it a piece that is page in and page out a parody of and a 
play off that tradition and that culture. If I, a Dodo clone (logician, 
college teacher, game maker, punster, Anglican deacon trainee, admirer of the 
mysteries that are little girls, photographer, and on and on), have refrained 
from translating any of Alice for 25 years because of my awareness of the 
total inappropriateness of doing so, whence -- ignorance aside -- come the 
chutzpah of people with none or few of these qualities and only a passing 
understanding of either Alice and its world or Lojban to take on this task. 
Are there no other books deserving of translation to take your skills out on, 
ones to which the skills would be appropriate? What about Oz or Willows (I 
an only think of about a half dozen problem in Oz; there are that many on an 
average page in Alice) or Pooh (aside from the saccharine spelling -- as 
Dorothy Parker, writing as Constant Reader remarked "Tonstant Weader fwowed 
up"), if you must do children's books. Or, as someone suggested, Tintin (not 
Asterix, which is almost up to Alice in puns at least). Or finish the Bible 
before taking on anything else (well, there are problems there, but there is 
already a good tradition of circumventing them -- the Vulgate Alice is no 
better on Tortoise than the Lojban: even after changing the second part of 
the joke it relies on a dubious nickname). Or pick on someone your own size: 
an adult novel: David Copperfield deserves translation into Lojban -- 
spelling asiide again -- or The Catcher in the Rye or some other modern 
classic, if Victorian is too much a problem outside of kiddylit. 
Oops, I did a scratch translation of the beginning of the Knight's 
introduction to his song once, to make a point about names, naming, calling 
and the like -- a logical point, not a translation as such.