Doing well...

I've been considering literary adaptations. I don't mean adapting a book into a comic or a comic into a film or a film into a book or any of the other possible combinations of media. Nor do I mean translations from one language into another, though that, as with the other possibilities would also be an interesting area of discussion.
No, I mean adapting a book into another book in the same language – perhaps for a younger readership. In essence I'm talking about taking a published work and just rewriting it. Exactly the same story in new words.
You are puzzled. You are (unless you are John whose area of expertise it is) thinking, "what about copyright?" Well copyrights expire. Trust me, there are adapted versions of books out there.
Specifically I have been thinking about a recent addition to my Alice In Wonderland collection. I saw it in the bookshop. Recognised from the cover that it was a version I didn't own, skimmed through to check the illustrations and found that they were also not in my collection and handed over the paltry sum required to purchase it. What I didn't do, until I got home, was look at the text. Why should I? I can recite great chunks of it from memory. I've read the book hundreds of times.
So, there I was at home, book in hand, open at the first page and what did I see?
Well I didn't see this.

"Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, `and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice `without pictures or conversation?'
So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her."

Instead, I saw this.

"Oh what a hot day it was. And what a most curious day it would turn out to be for young Alice. She and her sister had just finished a picnic by the pond in the meadow. They were sitting in the shade of a great oak tree.
Alice suddenly felt very sleepy. She yawned and wondered what to do next. She looked over to a grassy bank by the hedge. It was covered in daisies.
'I wonder,' she thought, lazily, "if the pleasure of making a daisy chain is worth all the effort of getting up and picking the daisies.'"

It was clear that this was an adaptation. A look at the cover revealed it to be "Alice In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll: a new adaptation by Archie Oliver." Illustrations were by Andrew Hopgood.

I'd like to just consider these two opening paragraphs, though the whole book is similarly adapted. Additionally I'll add two more opening versions from my extensive collection. The first is Carroll's own adaptation for young readers – The Nursery Alice.

"Once upon a time there was a little girl called Alice: and she had a very curious dream. Would you like to hear what she dreamed about?
Well, this was the first thing that happened. A White Rabbit came running by in a great hurry; and just as it passed Alice, it stopped, and took its watch out of its pocket."

The other one is a curiosity. It's from a book called Starshine Favourite Tales which is illustrated by Carlos Busquets but which credits neither the author who has adapted it nor Lewis Carroll anywhere in the volume.

"One beautiful, summer's day, Alice and her older sister, Anna, were spending the afternoon in the country. Anna was reading a book but Alice was beginning to feel bored when she suddenly saw a White Rabbit go racing by. He was a very strange sight, with his top hat and tails and his little briefcase."

What I find most curious about these versions, the Nursery Alice excluded, is not what they have left out in the adaptation but what they have added. The Archie Oliver version, for example, has added a tree (presumably by comparison with Disney rather than Carroll), added the fact that it's an oak, introduced a meadow and a picnic and specifically named the water as a pond when the original refers only to 'sitting on the bank'.

The unnamed one has, perhaps a little ironically, given a name to Alice's sister who is now 'Anna' and dressed the rabbit in a top hat and tails with a briefcase.

Now I can see from the language used that all of these alternate versions are meant for younger readers. The most complex of them, the Archie Oliver, still uses sentences that are shorter than the original and with a simpler structure. Clearly that's the purpose of the adaptation – to provide a book more accessible to younger readers. But 'The Nursery Alice' does the same thing without introducing any new elements, just by removing some of the existing ones. (It's also designed to be read out with lots of asides from the adult reader to the young child, but that's a different kind of adaptation.)

I can see the point of adapting. Really, I can. What I can't see the point of is adding all this extra detail. The original Alice is an acknowledged classic and, while there are certain elements of it that would be incomprehensible to a modern child, can be enjoyed still in its unamended form. The Archie Oliver one is tolerably well written with decent if unexceptional illustrations but what, actually, was the point? Why did it need to be rewritten? Should a version for younger/more modern readers be abridged? Perhaps. Should archaic references be removed or explained? Again, perhaps. Should the book be rewritten as from memory by someone who once saw the Disney version twenty years ago? Well, there's no reason why not, but also nothing, as far as I can see to be gained from the exercise, except perhaps the feeling by the adaptor that he has done something to earn his fee and perhaps a feeling that he has somehow stamped his own mark on it.

The Starlight version is more curious than I have lead you to believe. The opening paragraph is a model of sane abridgement compared to what follows. It introduces pirates and parrots (and parrots dressed as pirates). The tea party doesn't have a hatter and a hare and a dormouse, it has 'a strange group of characters' including an elephant (and, in the illustrations if not the text, a fox, a tortoise and a teddy bear). Alice is arrested for hitting the queen with a flamingo and sentenced to be thrown into a dungeon. And so on. Nothing at all to do with the book really. This isn't so much an adaptation as a random variation. And why? Certainly not for the fame as my researches have been unable to identify any author's name.

Anyway. My verdict on these versions is that they are strictly for collectors. That they are well done isn't in question but someone once said "there is nothing so useless as doing well something that should not be done at all" and that sums them up perfectly.
If you like the illustrations, by all means get the books but if you want a story to read to your kids, I'd go with the original or with Carroll's own Nursery Edition. They are classics for a reason.

Recycling

Note: This entry appeared previously on my old blog. Apologies if you are one of the three people that ever read it there but sometimes time constraints force a little recycling.

Before I begin I want to make one thing absolutely clear - some of my best friends are vegetarians ! I have absolutely nothing against them. I respect their beliefs and their lifestyle choices. I have eaten dinner at their houses and found it to be delicious. I do not in any way condone my fellow carnivores who bleat on about "rabbit food" and "nut cutlets" (the latter usually a reference to mental health rather than a recipe suggestion).
Vegetarians are perfectly nice, normal, decent people.
Let's face it though they can be a pain in the arse on a camping trip. I've camped everywhere from Alaska to Zambia, often in circumstances bearing too close a resemblance to "I'm a Celebrity-Get Me Out Of Here!". Occasionally we've been lucky and had no vegetarians in the group but more often there have been one or two. Now cooking for twelve people in camp conditions isn't especially taxing as the technique adopted by most people is to whack everything available into a pot and boil it death for a couple of hours. This of course doesn't work if you have vegetarians but it can be easily circumvented by using two pots.
Inevitably though there will be someone for whom this isn't good enough.

Many years ago I did a two week package tour in China with a large group - about thirty people - and it was all conducted in nice high class hotels with high quality restaurants. The trouble started at the airport when our Chinese guide informed us that vegetarians might find it a little troublesome because - in his words - "if it walks, crawls, swims or flies, we eat it."
There were dark mutterings.. We had arrived just in time for lunch in a local restaurant and it very quickly became apparent that our vegetarians were not happy. The vegetable soup contained chicken, the fried rice had small scraps of something unidentifiable as to species but definitely meat, dish after dish arrived with bits of things that had clearly once been squawking, bleating, mooing or in some cases barking. A cadre of about ten people formed and the only dish they would eat was plain boiled rice.
It was a pattern repeated over the next few days - I won't begin to repeat their remarks when we ate in the restaurant where the speciality was Peking Duck !
In Shanghai our local guide had got wind of the rising tide of gastronomic rebellion and took us to a restaurant where he arranged for a whole series of vegetable dishes to be produced. There were delicate soups, flavoured bean curd, flavoursome mixed dishes of hot peppers and bean sprouts - all sorts of things. It was delicious. I felt certain that this would please even our most militant vegetarians. Then I noticed one of them pushing it about on her plate with a fork.
"Has this" she queried loudly "been cooked in animal fat ?"
Nobody knew and when our guide asked the waiter he said he couldn't find out. She took this as oriental duplicity and flatly refused to eat anything. She would, she announced, be complaining to the holiday company. Her grumbling companions agreed.

It's happened all over the place. In Peru one of our party refused to eat for three days after being subjected to the hideous trauma of being forced to witness other people eating guinea pig. It spoiled her salad to be in the same room.
In Germany a diner in a hotel sent back her salad because it contained ham and then sent the replacement back because she suspected that they had just taken the ham off the old one and swapped it for cheese - the lettuce remaining contaminated.
In a Mongolian grill in San Francisco one man refused to eat food that had been cooked on a griddle that had previously had meat on it.

Camping is the worst though and when camping the ones who irritate me most are the part time vegetarians. These fall into two groups and it's tough to decide which is worse. Fist there are the ones who claim to be vegetarians unless they like the look of the meat option that you have cooked and then cheerfully tuck into that. Once while I was cooking a fry up I had a separate pan of fried vegetables and rice going on the other burner for the two people who had so far claimed to be vegetarians only to have both of them help themselves to sausages and ignore the food prepared for them. If there had been enough sausages to go around this wouldn't have been a problem but as there weren't it struck me as both inconsistent and extremely rude.
Then there are the ones who haven't been vegetarians at all but become so from pure squeamishness when confronted with certain foods - say chickens that are still basically chicken shaped rather than already processed and wrapped in film at the supermarket.
In Bam, in Iran, the cook team for the day had bought what they thought were frozen chicken portions. At lunch time as they took them from the ice box to thaw for the evening there was a penetrating shriek of
"Oh my god it's got a head !"
The "chicken portions" were whole quail complete with heads, wings and feet. None of the three people who were supposed to be cooking would go near them. A couple of us volunteered and chopped off the offending body parts but it was too late. They had already been seen, whole and intact. Nothing could persuade the cooks to return to the kitchen so we carried on and cooked them ourselves. Given that five people flatly refused to eat something that they had seen with its head attached, it gave the rest of us two each.
It was the same palaver - with the same people - as we worked our way through Pakistan and China. Whenever we had to buy chickens whole, especially if they had been running around in cages when we arrived, they refused food that they would gladly have eaten had it come in a polystyrene box from Tesco. Of course my insistence on giving our chickens names before they were killed probably didn't endear me to some people who thought that killing and cooking Annabelle, Lucinda and the gender-confused Tarquin was an act of monstrous cruelty.
Genuine and permanent vegetarians have my - admittedly rather baffled - respect and the ones who were vegetarians but suddenly change there mind when faced with sausages could just be considered lapsed but I find the squeamish variety nothing more than irritating.
Still I suppose they think the same about my mushroom allergy.

This weeks poem is a simple Limerick that I wrote many years ago when I was working with a vegetarian colleague who was rather partial to curries. The name has been changed.

John Robinson treated with scorn
Any food that had ever been born.
He would simply not eat
A dish made with meat
But sometimes stretched a point for a prawn. *

* Note for Americans. In UK English the words scorn/born/prawn all rhyme. I am aware that they don't in US English.

Iffleage Arties?

And now a post that not only combines something interesting about travel with something interesting about language but also manages to be a sequel to last week's post AND shows how poems can sometimes write themselves.

Intrigued? Pity, it's not as interesting as all that.

One of the things I quite like when I'm abroad is the odd, sometimes seemingly random, nature of the signage that is apparently intended to be in English. A particular favourite was in Nepal where a restaurant proudly, and perhaps appropriately, proclaimed "Try the real test of Tandoori!".

A rich source of such items can be found by examining the lists of hotel regulations that is usually taped inside the door of your room. In a hotel in Chang Rai I found a sign which is transcribed word for word, spelling for spelling and random gibberish for random gibberish, below.

Regulation to link the guest who come to stay

wellcome to Ian kum hotel quests are requested to co operate withthe hotel's directions here under

1. please deposite the valve belongings with our hotel safty box-

2. we will not be responsible for any artesies lost or stolen ~ in the room

3. iffleage arties are not allowed in the room or within the premises of the hotel

4. any danger caused to thehotel property during the pestrol of stay shall be responsible by guests

5. gambling are prohibited in the room

6. please do not disturb your heighbours

7. check out time in 12 hours

thank you

By Order:Foreigness Mancegment

I think most people would agree that it has a kind of poetry about it already. When I read it I spent ages trying to puzzle out exactly what an "iffleage arty" might be, worried in case I might have inadvertently taken one into my room. I f not for rule six I might have asked the heighbours.

In spite of it's inherent poetry I decided to add a couple of items from a similar notice in another hotel and turn it into verse. And here is the result.

Regulations to link the guest who come to stay.

In order to tidy the sociality and safety - peace to the guest who come to stay also in sure to the way policy nation wided tourism

1. Before 12 O'lock
Tourist visiting of the quest
Must retrun hotel
This rule from policy, so we tell.

2. Must passport bring
To the reception or section
Of the reception
For registartion - no expection.

3. Please to deposit
Value items in receptionist
Guest house is not
Responsible for any item that is lot.

4. It is to bring prohibit
Any procession into room
That is ilegality
Includin all weapon (Unles in militry)

5. Diasllow to apply
Another betting or a dopes
In room or house
Result of guest to be expelled out

6. For getting out or in
Please remember every tim
Handing in of the key
Before leaving room to go out to be free

7. Checking out before
12 O'cloak is required
Before leave please inspected
All belongs, room to be detected.

8. Forbid to get all
Belonging in hotel room
To hotel or house of guest
When you checking out please to not test

9. Guest to meet first
At reception only place
Awseome to lead to room
Without staff permission so seeking soon

10. If anyone guest not
To perform in activity
With these hotel style
Full panalty of law to put such guest on trial

By order

Immigration and foreigness mancegemant.

Perhaps not the greatest poem in the world, and certainly not in any way at all recitable but nevertheless my own small tribute to the unknown writer who had penned the original. Poetry like this is so easy that it almost writes itself.

But I still don't know what an "iffleage arty" is or why they were forbidden. If anyone can enlighten me, don't hesitate to do so.

What makes a perfect trip?

A quick anecdote, sadly not my own.

This week I saw my brother, freshly back from a trip to Borneo. He had been there with his wife and a friend and his wife. Everything, he assured me, had been absolutely perfect. The trip could not have gone better. Then he told me this story. With wives back at the lodge, he and his friend had gone exploring and they'd found a snake. It wasn't venomous but was sufficiently unusual to warrant a photograph session. The trouble was that it needed a more photogenic setting. They decided to capture it, take it home. photograph it and release it.

And that's what they tried to do. Unfortunately the snake had a different game plan which included sinking its fangs rather hard into my brother's friend's arm. And not letting go.

Together they prised the snake loose and let it go.

I was naturally very interested in this tale.

"That's your idea of 'nothing going wrong'." I said.

Without a moment's hesitation my brother's response was

"Well it didn't bite me, did it?"

It's very hard to argue with that kind of logic.