Warren Weaver - Other Activities

Other Activities

Weaver was fascinated by Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In 1964, having built up a collection of 160 versions in 42 languages, Weaver wrote a book about the translation history of Alice called Alice in many tongues: The translations of Alice in Wonderland. Among other features, it provides excerpts from the business correspondence of author Lewis Carroll (the Reverend Charles Dodgson) dealing with publishing royalties and permissions as Alice's fame snowballed worldwide. Ever the scientist, even in the area of literature, Weaver devised a design for evaluating the quality of the various translations, focusing on the nonsense, puns and logical jokes in the Mad Tea-Party scene. His range of contacts provided an impressive if eccentric list of collaborators in the evaluation exercise including anthropologist Margaret Mead (for the South Pacific Pidgin translation), longtime Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek, and Nobel laureate biochemist Hugo Theorell (Swedish).

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