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F OREWORD

Due to these linguistic features, translation from Circassian
to other languages is difficult since a great number of details
can be lost. And conversely, when a foreign text is translated
into Circassian, new meanings appear that are not found in
the original—the feature we made a use of—we tried, however
to stay true to the original.
It is difficult to translate Lewis Carroll but this labour is
greatly rewarded by the “creative ecstasy” that a translator
feels as he finds new equivalents and approaches that might
seem the only available ones at first—but even the very next
day, as one rereads the previous day’s translation, one findes
possibilities branching into many variants. This translation
could have been polished forever… but we believe that we have
stopped short of the line where the translator’s freedom with
his native language does not lead to an experimentation with
the original text, even if it is as untrivial and tempting as
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. We took various ap -
proaches, including one applied by Vladimir Nabokov: we
retained some of Carroll’s names but replaced others by more
local ones, according to etymology.
This allowed us to make the text closer to a Circassian
reader while retaining the traces of its origin. When possible,
the translators also tried to retain the rhythmic pattern: for
example, The Queen’s Crocket-Ground and Уэлий уадэлакъэ
(Uėliĭ uadėlakʺė) are identical semantically, syllabically and
rhythmically.
We also allowed ourselves a few deviations (hopefully
forgivable) as we were carried away with our “improvements”:
for instance, the word ашыкъ (ashykʺ), which refers to Mock
Turtle’s tale, derives from an Arabic word borrowed into
Turkish as aşık, Azeri aşıq, and refers to a singing poet, a poet
possessed by love, akin to an European minstrel. This, in our
opinion, fits the description of the character and provides
additional connotations to the title of Chapter IX, bringing

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