Edward Lear

In The Sound of Nonsense, Richard Elliott highlights the importance of sound in understanding the 'nonsense' of writers such as Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, James Joyce and Mervyn Peake, before connecting this noisy writing to works which engage more directly with sound, including sound poetry, experimental music and pop. By emphasising sonic factors, Elliott makes new and fascinating connections between a wide range of artistic examples to ultimately build a case for the importance of sound in creating, maintaining and disrupting meaning.

Este trabajo presenta una lectura de tres relatos paradigmáticos del nonsense ocampiano en su inflexión Lear, “El automóvil”, “Sábanas de tierra” y “La pista de hielo y de fuego”, de la compilación titulada Y así sucesivamente (1987). Se sabe que Silvina Ocampo leía a Edward Lear, aunque no es posible afirmar que haya querido imitarlo, rendirle homenaje o escribir relatos a la manera de limericks. Sí se puede, en cambio, leer estos cuentos a partir del modo en que los atraviesan ciertos rasgos propios del nonsense de Lear. La hipótesis de trabajo afirma que en ellos aparece, desprendida de la rima, la estructura narrativa efímera del limerick, que trastorna la forma del relato y la impregna de fugacidad y tontería. El lector se encuentra entonces con cuentos anómalos, de raras formas breves, con aire de inconclusos. Son historias mínimas en las que casi no hay narración, puesto que una sola anécdota insignificante ocupa, como en los limericks de Lear, el espacio todo del relato.

Edward Lear has secured a prominent position in the history of literature and travel writing thanks to his nonsense books and his journals; he is considered one of the most innovative zoological illustrators of the nineteenth century and is being rediscovered as a landscape painter in watercolour and oil. This article argues that he also deserves to be remembered among the precursors of modern comic art. His picture stories, though never published in his lifetime, represent an early instance of autobiographical graphic narrative while his limericks, never out of print since 1861, introduced a radically innovative caricatural style and a conception of the relationship between pictures and text that strongly influenced modern comic artists.

Nonsense literature is often regarded as written for children only. If authors write in a nonsense genre, they are most likely to be labelled as children's writers with their books inevitably ending up in the Waterstones children's department. However, nonsense is not just a meaningless gibberish created for the mere entertainment of children, it has a far more contradictory and dark nature. By reading Peake alongside Lear, I will try to show that nonsense (at least in the case of these two writers) has, in fact, a disturbing and adult nature and that the adult writers, who once were claimed as children's, thus need to be re-categorised.

Is it possible to outdo a great master? Polish versions of Edward Lear’s absurd limericks prepared by the members of the Translation Section versus Stanisław Barańczak’s translations

Stanisław Barańczak, an eminent Polish poet, translator and scholar, claimed that every thoughtful literary translator before setting about to their work should first identify a particular text’s semantic dominant. By the term “semantic dominant” he meant a set of subjectively chosen features which the translator considers as the most important and characteristic of a given source text. He believed that those features constitute the key to all of the source text’s meanings, to its sense understood as the entirety of both its semantic potential and artistic form. The next step on which a translator should focus is creating an equivalent text in the target language. The target text should retain the same features and spirit of the original, and produce the same effect on the audience. Finally, it should function in the new language as a vital part of its culture. As far as poetry was concerned, Barańczak mostly implemented his own theory by trying to keep the form of a poem, or at least its most prominent elements, usually adapting it to the specifics of the target language. Whenever meaning hindered the technical fluency of a poem, he did not hesitate to alter it. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that his translations of the absurd, epigrammatic limericks of Edward Lear sometimes sound nothing like the originals. It would seem that not all of his ideas and choices were most successful, as he frequently refused to heed the original sense of the poems and had no qualms in adding, omitting or even completely changing their meaning. It can be pointed out that it was caused by his identifying the humorous, grotesque effect as the semantic dominant of the limericks, but also by the fact that he tended, perhaps unconsciously, to incorporate his translations into his own creative oeuvre. That is why the Translation Section of the Jagiellonian University Association of Students of English undertook to challenge Barańczak’s skill and translate several of Lear’s limericks themselves. This paper presents the outcome of this experiment by comparing the students’ results with Barańczak’s translations and by analyzing the domesticating strategies employed by this creative translator.

Από τα λίγα δημοσιευμένα κείμενα της περιήγησης του Edward Lear στην ευρύτερη περιοχή της Λάκκας Σουλίου, αλλά, κυρίως, από τα αδημοσίευτα, μέχρι σήμερα, σχέδια του Άγγλου τοπιογράφου, αντλήσαμε ανεκτίμητες πληροφορίες για κτήρια της περιοχής που χάθηκαν στο πέρασμα του χρόνου.

Οι απεικονίσεις της κούλιας στη Σκάλα του Λούρου, του μονότοξου γεφυριού της Πάσαινας στον ποταμό Λούρο, κοντά στην Παντάνασσα, και κυρίως του ναού του Αγίου Δημητρίου στην Κρανιά είναι οι μόνες, μέχρι σήμερα, γνωστές των τριών μνημείων.

Βασιζόμενοι στο σχέδιο του Lear από την Κρανιά Πρεβέζης, μπορέσαμε να υποστηρίξουμε ότι στη θέση του ανεγερθέντος μετά το 1865 ναού του Αγίου Δημητρίου προϋπήρχε παλαιότερος, επιβεβαιώνοντας, έτσι, τη διατηρημένη προφορική παράδοση. Ο προηγούμενος ναός είχε χαγιάτι στη βόρεια πλευρά του, το ανατολικό τμήμα του οποίου σώθηκε, αφού ενσωματώθηκε σε αποθηκευτικό χώρο που δημιουργήθηκε στη βορειοανατολική γωνία του ναού.

Ο εντοπισμός της επιγραφής 1866 ΦΕΒΡΟΥ, στην πάνω βόρεια άκρη τού ανατολικού τοίχου τού ναού, επιβεβαιώνει τη σταδιακή κατασκευή του από το 1865 μέχρι το 1867, όταν χρονολογείται η εικόνα του Αγίου Δημητρίου στο τέμπλο του.

Illustrating a book is always a challenge. To re-illustrate the original self-illustrated book is a double jeopardy, especially when certain illustrations have become inseparable from the work and its creator. How do you compete with what has already become a part of the cultural legacy? And how does a shift in meaning through translation affect the image? How does it influence the reader’s perception? In this dissertation, I'm trying to tackle these issues by analysing different editions of Lear’s nonsense works illustrated by various artists.

The emergence of the "rasa" of Nonsense literature in India coincides with the literary works of a brilliant writer, poet and illustrator who is still mesmerizing Bengali readers and their children: Sukumar Ray (1887 - 1923), the so-called "Lewis Carroll of India".
What are the relations between English Nonsense literature and the emergence of an Indian modern genre of Nonsense? How extensive was Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear's influence on Sukumar Ray's works?
The corpus of this thesis discusses the comparative establishment of the literary genre of Nonsense in two cultural and geographic milieux, namely Victorian England and the Bengal Renaissance, as the result of the crisis of the "modern" man juxtaposing nonsense to "common sense".
The appendix comprises original Italian translations of a selection of Sukumar Ray's works, mainly from "Hojoborolo" and "Abol Tabol".

Within the field of Italian Studies, ‘nonsense’ has been traditionally considered either as a historical, anglophone-only literary phenomenon, or as a broad linguistic and philosophical concept with no specific chronotopes. Drawing on previous research on the Italian legacy of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, this paper argues that ‘nonsense’ is actually describable as a specific literary genre within modern Italian comic poetry. Three major features are identified for this purpose. First, the impossibility for potential translators to establish a formal equivalence with nonsense texts without reproducing the processes—or programs—which originally presided over their conception (e.g. portmanteau or corpus-based lexicon, meta- and peri-semantics, or specific forms of parody). Second, the ability to camouflage senseless or trivial content through recognizable shapes and structures appropriated from models of the canon—a very specific characteristic of Italian nonsense-verse. Third, a special relation with place names, and with geography in general as a linguistic repertoire. The final part of the study is devoted to a reading of three books that are proposed as the seminal models for the nonsense-verse genre in Italy: Fosco Marini’s Gnòsi delle Fànfole (1966-1994), Giulia Niccolai’s Harry’s Bar e Altre Poesie (1969-1981) and Toti Scialoja’s Versi del Senso Perso (1971-1989).

It's nonsense, but within that, Lewis Carroll's logic in this example strictly follows the logic of Edward Lear's nonsense. This is about the "Banker's" face after his encounter with the Bandersnatch in the chapter "The Banker's Fate" in Lewis Carroll's, Henry Holiday's and Joseph Swain's "The Hunting of the Snark" (1876). As for the Banker and his face, you find a textual allusion to Edward Lear as well as pictorial allusions to William Sidney Mount and Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder. --- See also https://www.academia.edu/10103262/Noseflip_animation_ and https://www.academia.edu/9964379/Schnarkverschlimmbesserung --- 2015-01-21: The illustration also may have been inspired by Charles Darwin's "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals", e.g. https://www.academia.edu/10287871/The_Expression_of_Emotions

2015-03-09: Removal of two obvious typing errors. No change of meaning.

2017-09-29: This is about the Banker's face. I just noticed that in some of my articles I called the "fit" in "The Hunting to the Snark" which uses that illustration "The Banker's Fate". Sorry, it is "The Banker's Tale".

This article presents the comic images of Italy that transpire from Italy's representation in the English-and Polish-language limerick. In accordance with the rules of the genre, Italy becomes a stage for nonsense characters and actions. The outlined literary motifs of Italy, a country normally connoting high civilisation and a historically rich culture, studied in Polish-and English-language authors, confirm the sophisticated nature of the genre, popular in intelligentsia circles. The article focuses on the following four areas: 1. the pioneering role of Edward Lear's A Book of Nonsense (1846), which, for the first time in limerick form, features names of Italian localities as well as the 'Italian' experiences of Lear himself, a landscape painter and English expatriate who was not only enchanted by Italy but was also a sensitive observer of the alien human 'habitat' created by locally cherished customs; 2. a humorously conceived 'map' of Italy to be crafted on the basis of representative collections and anthologies of limericks; 3. historical figures-especially those connected with the proud history of the Roman Empire, whose limerick image is far removed from its official textbook biographies; 4. the presence of contemporary Italian language (associated with musicality and elegance) and classical Latin (associated with high education) in the limerick narration, contrasting with the frequently bawdy content of the verse, which is a source of humour.

There are obvious problems with the idea of translating nonsense or, for that matter, with paraphrasing it.  Whatever may be the case with literary nonsense, they have been largely ignored with respect to (supposed) philosophical nonsense.  This paper looks at how they arise with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.  On the traditional ‘ineffability’ reading they are not entirely unfamiliar since similar problems arise with the translation of mystical works.  But those arising from the so-called ‘resolute reading’ may well be unprecedented.

Winner of the 2017-2018 Colin Franklin Book Collecting Prize (University of Oxford).
How many times do we hear that the discovery of one book can change the direction of someone’s life? Well, quite often. Too often, to be true. But in my case, this somehow proved to be undeniable. In general, my essay shows how finding a strange-looking book of English nonsense poetry as a schoolgirl in a random bookshop in a provincial Russian city (that used to be closed to foreigners) can eventually lead one to researching nonsense poetry at Oxford. This book in a way was my Golden ticket that allowed me into the Book factory. As a professional translator, I started looking into the multiple problems of translating Lear’s nonsense into Russian without losing the magic, that is why now I have every possible edition of Lear’s works translated into my mother language, and their number keeps growing as the admirers of the ‘untranslatable’ do not give up that easy. But Lear’s nonsense represents an interesting literary and visual challenge for illustrators too. For this reason, in my Master’s dissertation I chose to analyse different editions of Lear’s nonsense works illustrated by various artists, both British and Russian, trying to pin down, among other issues, how a shift in meaning through translation affects the image and how it affects the reader’s perception. During this research, I managed to get first-hand interviews with some of Lear’s surviving illustrators, as well as some new unexpected editions to my collection. I am also planning to start a web project called “Lear Illustrated” which would gather all possible illustrated editions of Lear’s works.
Although the main focus of my nonsense collection is books by and about Lear (including original editions, various biographies, selected letters, translations, etc.), the significant part of it is devoted to what I call ‘nonsense in context’ as it includes nursery rhymes and various collections of limericks. Thus, both strands complement and enrich each other and reinforce that nonsense is a unique genre, which straddles the blurred line between folk culture, literature and art. As for my long-term aspirations, I am always working on building up my collection and at the moment I am particularly interested in nonsense alphabets, both by Lear and other authors. As we know, different alphabets have different number of letters (e.g. 26 in English against 33 in Russian), as well as different associations caused by those letters. It would be interesting to look at the translated versions of Lear’s numerous alphabets and see what transformations they undergo and how translators cope with extra letters.
Finally, I am interested in visual representation of Lear’s nonsense in modern children’s picture books and how nonsense is generally translated into modern culture and become one of its pillars. So, as you can see, the scope of my collection is quite diverse, and due to Lear’s prolific heritage and the renewed interest in nonsense literature there are almost no chances that I will ever own enough bookcases to contain it.

Pittore o poeta? E poeta per adulti o per bambini? E poi, poeta comico o poeta serio? Forse non esiste nel panorama letterario italiano un autore dalla fortuna critica più multivalente di Toti Scialoja. Definito di volta in volta come «il primo vero esempio italiano della straordinaria tradizione inglese del nonsense e del limerick» (Calvino), «il talento poetico più originale e compiuto rivelatosi in Italia nel corso degli anni Settanta e Ottanta» (Raboni), «uno dei fatti più singolari della letteratura italiana di questi anni» (Manganelli), pure resta poco studiato e poco conosciuto dai lettori di oggi. In occasione del centenario della nascita questo libro si propone di tracciarne la prima biografia intellettuale, ricostruita e raccontata attraverso scritti inediti, lettere private, documenti editoriali e materiale fotografico.

O homem que disse de si próprio ser um pássaro estranho, e que se representou pictoricamente como pássaro, começou por desenhar pássaros e flores e, aos vinte anos, publicou um importante livro de ilustração científica, o primeiro livro do género sobre um único tipo de aves, os papagaios. Como ilustrador científico, Lear desenhou pássaros exóticos mas reais; fora dessa área desenhou igualmente pássaros inventados e disparatados e também os incluiu nos seus poemas nonsense onde pássaros se comportam como pessoas e estas surgem com a aparência ou o comportamento de pássaro.

Palavras-chave
Edward Lear, pássaros, ilustração, nonsense


The man that defined himself as a strange bird, and that has represented himself as one, began by drawing flowers and birds and, at the age of twenty, published an important volume of naturalistic illustration on a single species of birds, the parrots. As a bird’s illustrator, Lear draw exotic but real birds; he also draw invented and nonsensical birds and included them in his nonsense poems where birds behave like people and people appear with the form and behaviour of birds.

Key words
Edward Lear, birds, illustration, nonsense

3 pg sample--An introduction to children' poetry in picture books, with attention to poetry written in response to pre-existing images, illustrations inspired by pre-existing verse, and traditions such as light verse and nonsense verse for children. Major authors discussed include Ann Taylor, Walter Crane, Maurice Sendak, William Blake, Edward Lear, Dr. Seuss, June Jordan, Robert Froman, Chris Raschka, Edward Gorey, Nancy Willard, and JonArno Lawson.

Looking at nonsense alphabets from the nineteenth century onwards and their translation into French, this study will offer an extreme example of what happens in all translation and discuss the tools available to translators, and how ambivalent and creative translation can be.  The first part of this paper will focus on one of Edward Lear’s nonsense alphabets to introduce the translation problem of this genre: finding equivalencies for the words illustrating each letter. Then, the case of Neil Gaiman’s The Dangerous Alphabet (2008) will show how pictures can help further the translation instead of limiting it. Finally, the example of two published translations of works by Edward Gorey will illustrate the impact of the translator’s subjectivity and the potential it holds for the translated text.
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Coussy, Audrey, ‘T is for Translation(s) — Translating Nonsense Alphabets into French’, in Prismatic Translation, ed. by Matthew Reynolds, Transcript, 10 (Cambridge: Legenda, 2020)

This innovative collection of essays is the first to situate comedy and laughter as central rather than peripheral to nineteenth century life. Victorian Comedy and Laughter: Conviviality, Jokes and Dissent offers new readings of the works of Charles Dickens, Edward Lear, George Eliot, George Gissing, Barry Pain and Oscar Wilde, alongside discussions of much-loved Victorian comics like Little Tich, Jenny Hill, Bessie Bellwood and Thomas Lawrence. Tracing three consecutive and interlocking moods in the period, all the contributors engage with the crucial critical question of how laughter and comedy shaped Victorian subjectivity and aesthetic form. Malcolm Andrews, Jonathan Buckmaster and Peter Swaab explore the dream of print culture togetherness that is conviviality, while Bob Nicholson, Louise Lee, Ann Featherstone, Louise Wingrove and Oliver Double discuss the rise-on-rise of the Victorian joke -- both on the page and the stage -- while Peter Jones, Jonathan Wild and Matthew Kaiser consider the impassioned debates concerning old and new forms of laughter that took place at the end of the century.

Gifted with a unique imagination, these two great masters of nonsense created their own abstract worlds. Though their creative lives might not have much in common (apart from both being accomplished artists, of course), it is their nonsense that unites them. So, what do Lear’s nonsenses and Peake’s rhymes without reason share and in what way do they diverge?
17 February 2018, University of York.
Keynote speaker: JENNY UGLOW

When translating, the translator juggles between multiple alternatives before settling for one definitive version. Variants belong to the draft stage, not the finished work. Likewise, the history of translation confirms that a translator is expected to be objective and invisible – thus feeding the myth of an absence of variants in the process and the source text.
This paper will question this pervasive conception of translation, very much alive among practitioners and readers, using the example of nonsense alphabets from the 19th century onwards (Edward Lear, Edward Gorey, Neil Gaiman…). The long tradition of nonsense alphabets in English embodies a paradox also found in translation – how working within confines can rhyme with creation and possibilities. The very constraints of Nonsense foster creativity, “balanc[ing] a multiplicity of meaning with a simultaneous absence of meaning” (Tigges); alphabet translations exaggerate this.
The fixed form of these texts – rhyming scheme; lively rhythm; vivid, precise imagery – foxes the translator: one of Lear’s alphabets (1877) relies on the letters of the alphabet to build and further the story (as an Oulipo text might). While long-standing principles, author’s authority and editorial expectations tend to demand respect for the original, a whole system of reinvention proves necessary to recreate this fixed exercise and its often absurd humour. Gone is the one obvious, correct translation, replaced by multiple subjective ones – consequently challenging the notion of mistranslation, usually synonymous with failure.
The translator’s aim and subjectivity foreground the reasons behind certain translation choices and their effects on the target text. I will include my own translations and versions by other translators to illustrate my theoretical approach (Henri Meschonnic, George Steiner…). Inspired by the Oulipo acronym (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle – Workshop for potential literature), I shall explore the tools available to the translator-as-craftsman to create texts full of potential and potentials.

This work presents an interpretation of three paradigmatic stories of the ocampian nonsense in its Lear inflection, “El automovil”, “Sabanas de tierra” y “La pista de hielo y de fuego”, of the collection entitled Y asi sucesivamente (1987). It is known that Silvina Ocampo had read Edward Lear’s literature, although it is not possible to state that she would have wanted to imitate him, to perform a tribute to him nor to write stories like limericks. It is possible, however, to read this stories from the way in which they are intersected by certain characteristics of Lear’s nonsense. The working hypothesis asserts that the ephemeral narrative structure of limerick appears in these stories, detached of the rhyme, and it disrupts the story’s form and permeates it with fugacity and foolishness. So, the reader encounters anomalous stories, with short and rare forms, that seem unfinished. They have minimal plots, in which there isn’t much narration, because one insignificant anecdote takes...

Illustration Magazine, Autumn, Issue 65

Russian editions of Edward Lear
Nonsense verse may appear to be a particularly English art form, but throughout the 20th century Russian publishers, readers – and illustrators – have embraced the mad world of Edward Lear’s nonsense verse and made it so much their own that many Russians today are astonished to discover that the author was not from their own country. We find out how artists have interpreted Lear’s visions and humour and how these have been affected by changing social and political developments.