Sonja-Anja-Alisa, ovvero, Le Avventure di Alice in Russia

Abstract

Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) is a text rich of cultural and literary references to Victorian England. This feature is one of the major obstacles to translating this work since the transfer of cultural markers from source to target text often produces partial or total loss of certain nuances of meaning. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the Russian translations of Alice through a comparative study of three translation specimens (Nabokov 1923; Olenič-Gnenenko 1940; Demurova 1967, 1978), which constitute just as many methods (domestication, foreignization, hybridization). Through the study of some difficult cases of translation – proper names with culture-specific connotations, puns and parodies – I will highlight the specificities of these different versions to understand whether and how the translator’s choices have affected the reception of Wonderland in Russia.