ILLUSTRATING ALICE IN WONDERLAND IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM: NEW MEANINGS FOR AN EVERGREEN CHILDREN’S CLASSIC

Abstract

The link between words and pictures is an internal feature of children’s literature. This bundle of meanings can be a real challenge for the translator, who has to work both on words and on the pictures and their relation to the words. All this is particularly important when a text has been originated with pictures as an integral part of it, with continuous inter-referential connections between words and pictures and whose illustrations were decided by the author of the book, as it is the case for “Alice in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll, a text which had been re-translated and re-edited several times, by providing it with new sets of images. Thus, the aim of this paper is to show the visual representations of Alice in the last decade, comparing the original drawings by Tenniel with the pictures used in Italian publications, in the attempt to unveil new ways in which Carroll’s character and her world have moved from a Victorian fantasy in order to gain eventually new cultural meanings.