Alicia in Terra Mirabili

As if the Lewis Carroll classic Alice's Adventures in Wonderland were not strange enough already, I just found the whole thing translated into Latin. Carroll, a college professor at a time when Latin was a staple of schoolboy knowledge, would certainly have approved.

Like Alice encountering Jabberwocky for the first time, I don't completely understand it, but I'm charmed by what I do understand. In particular, the translator's take on "The Mouse's Tale" (you know, the poem shaped like a mouse's tail--"Fury said to a mouse / That he met in the house...") can only be explained by a stroke of genius. Besides the fact that the English rhyme is transformed into a flawless Roman jingle, the mouse's canine nemesis is re-christened Nero.