Czech responses to Carroll’s Alice
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The prominent Czech artist and filmmaker Jan Švankmajer has been enticed by Carroll’s Alice for over 50 years. After the short film Jabberwocky (1971), he shot the full-feature film Alice in 1988. In 2017, he created a new set of illustrations for the representative edition of the pre-war translation of Alice by Jaroslav Císař. The Czech titles of Švankmajer’s films are more revealing than the English ones. His Alice — literally translated — reads Something from Alice; the Czech title of his Jabberwocky reads Jabberwocky and the Apparel of Straw Hubert, combining Carroll’s monster with a character from the children’s book Annie the Dwarf and Straw Hubert (1936), an overt response to Alice by the Czech poet Vítězslav Nezval. The paper will give a brief overview of the history of Czech translations of Alice and focus on Nezval’s and Švankmajer’s re-interpretations of Carroll’s books. The importance of Carroll for the Czech surrealist movement will be discussed, together with the problems of changes, both intentional and non-intentional, in target readership. |
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