The Jabberwocky Index

Followers of my blog may notice a new item in the menu bar—Jabberwocky Index. While this site is not about the poem Jabberwocky, my daughter is correct—in the About page—about my fondness for the poem. In high school (1967-‘71), my friends and I found and shared various translations of this poem—actually I think it was my friend R*** H********* who found most of them. Besides the original poem, I had translations in French (tr. 1931), German (tr. 1872), and Latin (tr. circa 1871). I also had one parody version in Plain Geometry (1925).

Jabberwocky

When I tell people about my site, I always say, “Like the Lewis Carroll poem.” In 2012, my daughter Miriam set up this blog for me, naming it based upon my perceived obsession with the poem. While she mentioned the Jabberwocky, she did not include the original poem and she buried the translations that people have created in a small link. I now have followers from all over the world and I cannot assume that all of my readers are familiar with the story of Alice and the poem.

My wife Jan has been on a very restricted diet lately, so I have not been making a lot of fancy meals. To keep up interest, I decided to put up a page about the poem and its translations. In creating this page, I have actually become the obsessive person that my daughter joked that I was—“I have all the translations, bwa ha ha ha!” (On-line at least.) Since I have no desire to host so many versions of the Jabberwocky poem on my site, I have made a link index to all of these translations on-line.

While Wikipedia lists that Jabberwocky has been translated into 65 languages, many are not directly available on-line. I found two sites that have collected many of the translations—Жаб Бервоцкий’s Journal and Jabberwocky Variations—I have merged the best of these two sites and I have also found a several translations and other reference material—on transcribing this complex poem in different languages—that both of these sites are missing. Currently there are links to 140 translations of the poem in 45 languages. There are also links to 28 parodies of the poem, 4 spellcheckifications, and 37 items of reference material related to the Jabberwocky.