‘Mine Is a Long and Sad Tale’. Law and Legal Allusions in Polish Translations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll is a masterpiece of children’s literature. Its great popularity has attracted the attention of artists, directors and translators throughout the world. The main titular character of Carroll’s book, Alice, experiences many adventures during which she encounters various creatures. One of the inhabitants of Wonderland is the Mouse. The animal tells Alice a story about Fury, attempting to sentence the poor rodent to the death penalty in a bizarre trial. The scene in question features the concepts and institutions of British Victorian law. The goal of the translator who faces the challenge of rendering the Mouse’s Tale into another language is not only to preserve the form of the poem, i.e. rhymes and tail-like shape, but also the legal message. This paper is concerned with translators’ ways of depicting the Mouse’s Tale in the Polish language. As the research shows, the Polish authors had various ideas to describe the original, resulting in different readings and translational approaches. The analysis includes Alice’s selected Polish versions, from the earliest pieces written at the beginning of the twentieth century to the most recent. The material collected for the study provokes a discussion on translating law in children’s literature.