Czech responses to Carroll’s Alice

Authors

RAMBOUSEK Jiří

Year of publication 2022
Type Appeared in Conference without Proceedings
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Arts

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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