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"The Haunting of the Snarkasbord" is a dark, humorous parody of
Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark" concerning what followed
the Baker's vanishing and the Crew's continued hunt for a snark on
Snark Island. Alison Tannenbaum wrote the poetry in "Snarkasbord: A
Crewsome Choice" and also wrote notes on Byron W. Sewell's
illustrations for it. An introduction and Gardnerian-style notes
have been written by August A. Imholtz, Jr in his inimitable style.
This edition marks the first public publication of the poems "The
Booking," "The Recrewting," and "The Sailing"-the three "Missing
Fits" composed by Charlie Lovett. These were originally written for
a secret English Snarkian Society, and were mentioned by Selwyn
Goodacre in his "The Listing of the Snark" in Martin Gardner's
final version of The Annotated Hunting of the Snark. Hitherto, they
have only ever been seen by the members or guests of the Society.
In addition to his wonderful illustrations, Byron W. Sewell has
contributed an original short story, ,"" which tells what happened
to the Baker from the viewpoint of the Boojum. Like Lovett's
parodies, this short story has never before been seen by the
public; it was issued in a very limited number to his Carrollian
friends.
In this retelling of Lewis Carroll's classic tale, Alice's fall
down the rabbit hole turns into a terrifying descent through the
centre of the Earth, hopelessly snarling her hair into a tangles
mess, and nearly setting it alight.
In the first of these two crime fiction tales, R.I.P. (Restless in
Pieces), modern grave-robbers steal the bones of Charles Dodgson
(also known as Lewis Carroll), expecting to hold them for ransom.
But they also discover a rare first edition of "Alice's Adventures
in Wonderland" as well as one of Dodgson's missing Diaries in the
casket. This sets off a series of events, both deadly and comical,
across England, Wales, and North Korea. Inspector Ian Spectre of
Scotland Yard is brought in to solve the case, assisted by none
other than Dodgson's ghost. The second tale, "The Oxfordic Oracle,"
is set in Victorian Oxford. Inspector Spectre goes undercover to
investigate numerous reported strange events during the meetings of
the Oxford Phantasmalogical Society, where an actress prophesies
under the influence of ethene gas escaping into the basement of the
building. Charles Dodgson also makes a first time appearance at the
Society meeting, which gets out of hand as too much ethene escapes
and everyone begins to prophesy nonsense which becomes the
inspiration for some of the famous poems in Carroll's "Sylvie and
Bruno" books."
Although the author (with many previous unique Snarkian works under
his belt) describes "Snarkmaster" as the final work in a trilogy,
it stands alone quite distinctly as a unique, gripping tale of a
power struggle between good and evil, concluding with the
development of an unusual intermediate state. Most of the story
takes place prior to the traditional Snark voyage (described in
verse in Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark"), but becomes
inextricably linked with it-unless it isn't... The literary
structure of "Snarkmaster" reveals some influence of Carroll's
"Sylvie and Bruno" tales, as the characters (including the great
Charles Dodgson himself) experience dream states and the appearance
of at least one fairy. The comprehensive glossary and painstakingly
hand-detailed maps of each of the islands in the archipelago may
not be essential to follow the story, but they certainly enhance
it. The meticulously hand-inked illustrations emphasize some of the
important aspects of the story and provide a tropical ambiance for
the text. While not necessarily a prerequisite, knowledge of
Carroll's original poem is likely to make Snarkmaster more
enjoyable for most readers.
Lewis Carroll's classic "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" has been
translated into over a hundred languages, from French to Japanese
to Esperanto. In this translation into the rich dialect of the
Appalachian Mountains, the translators have treated the story as a
folktale, in order to create the sense that the reader is listening
as an adult tells the story to a child. The story has been
transported from Victorian English to post-Civil-War West Virginia,
into an Appalachian setting appropriate for the dialect. The
spelling used aims towards a literary orthography, rather than
towards a phonemic respelling of the language entirely, and so it
avoids unnecessary "eye-dialect" ("funkshun" instead of "function,"
and so forth). The sounds of the language used in "Alice's
Adventures in an Appalachian Wonderland" will certainly be familiar
to most readers, but a short glossary has also been included.
Roa Wioz (1882-1937), the locally-admired though otherwise
little-known Zumorgian translator, spent seventeen years of his
miserable life (when he wasn't tending to his beloved goats)
translating Lewis Carroll's classic "Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland" into Zumorigenflit and transposing it into u ian
culture. Sadly, u was swallowed up by the Soviet Union in 1947.
Most of its citizens were either purged (lined up and summarily
shot when they refused to combine their goats into a communal herd)
or transported to the Gulag for political re-education and attitude
adjustment. All cultural artifacts were systematically destroyed
and most Zumorigenflit books were burned as part of the Soviet
effort to obliterate u, along with any memory of it. The only known
present-day u ian survivors of The Great u Purge (other than any
possible survivors of the Gulag, whose descendants might
conceivably live in Siberia) are now toothless old women, whose
parents fled with them as infants from u to Transjordan the night
of the purge. Today they live (if you can call it that) in a
squalid refugee camp on the desert outskirts of Amman surrounded by
very unhappy and angry displaced Palestinians. Some of these u ian
refugees are still able to speak a little Zumorigenflit, though few
of them can read it. For those interested in such esoteric things,
"Alo k ujy Gigio Soagenli y" was first published by the Itadabukan
Press in the capital city of Sprutni ovyurt in 1919. The city,
which was mistakenly thought to be a German forward supply area,
was literally flattened and burned to the ground by Royal Air Force
saturation bombing in 1943, and all that remains of it are a few
remnants of the ancient Palace's foundations and a gigantic
reinforced concrete statue of Joseph Stalin, whose face has been
shattered by what was probably machine gun target practice. The
original story has here been updated to modern times, as if this
strange, harsh, and dangerous land still existed in the modern
world. It doesn't, except in my imagination and that of Mahendra
Singh, whose heart swells with the Song of the Goat. -- Byron W.
Sewell
Middle English is the name commonly given to the forms of English
current from about 1100 to roughly 1500, between pre-Conquest Old
English, which is hardly intelligible today without special study,
and the early modern English of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
Of course it changed considerably during that period, and different
dialects existed in various geographical areas. The form of Middle
English used in this translation is for the most part the East
Midland and London dialect of writers like Chaucer in the
fourteenth century, which is the direct ancestor of our modern
standard form of English. It is not hard to read with a little
practice, but an extensive glossary has been provided to assist the
reader where necessary. Imagining what Londoners of the fourteenth
or fifteenth centuries might have made of Lewis Carroll's "Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland" provides a historical perspective not
only on Chaucer's fourteenth century and Carroll's nineteenth, but
on our own time as well. The self-opinionated Victorian child whose
delightfully illogical adventures down the rabbit-hole are so
contrary to the order and regularity of her life in the waking
world receives an education in "otherness" that is both a critique
of contemporary society and an enjoyable children's fairytale.
Adapting this to a medieval milieu has required changes not only of
language but of costume and customs as well. While we have sought
to keep both text and illustrations as close as possible to
Carroll's and Tenniel's originals, it is probably the differences
that will be of most interest. Following Chaucer's practice in his
fiction, Carroll's prose has been translated into Middle English
verse. In the illustrations Alice wears the sort of clothes a child
of roughly equivalent social standing might have worn. Dodos and
flamingoes were unknown in medieval England, but Phoenix and swans
will do instead. Judges did not wear wigs, but Serjeants at law
were distinguished by the coif. Parodies of medieval poetry replace
some of Carroll's parodies of poems Alice gets wrong, poems
Victorian children may have been taught. Puns on tail and tale are
possible in Middle English, but those on tea and on tortoise are
not; suitable substitutes have however been found. Carroll's
"Laughing and Grief," for "Latin and Greek," have become the
"Wlaffyng and Gristbitunge" which seemed to a fourteenth-century
author to describe the uncouth dialects of the North which he could
not appreciate. The Caterpillar's hookah has become an alembic, for
the medieval Catirpel has been turned into an alchemist searching
for the philosopher's stone that will change base metals into gold.
Notions of physics, geography, and astronomy altered radically
between Chaucer's time and Carroll's, to say nothing of our own. A
medieval Alice's education would have been rather different from
her Victorian counterpart's. She can teach the Duchess something of
the Ptolemaic, but not the Copernican, system of astronomy. She has
learnt some Latin from her brother's "donat," or elementary
textbook written by Aelius Donatus as long ago as the fourth
century AD. She may not have lived as much under the sea as the
Mokke Se-Tortus has, where the school he went to unnecessarily
offered "wasschyng" as an extra, but she can be surprised by his
strange versions of the medieval course of education the Trivium
and Quadrivium. The so-called "Middle" Ages seemed entirely modern
to those who lived in them, but at this distance it may not be easy
to appreciate what life and mental attitudes were like so long ago.
So how should one read a translation into Middle English of Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland? As the King advised the White Rabbit,
about to read out, aloud, from a paper picked up on the court room
floor, "Begin at the beginning, ... go on till you come to the end:
then stop." And if at first sight there does not appear to be "an
atom of meaning in it," closer inspection may reveal so
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