The Mouse's Tale
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"The Mouse's Tale" is a shaped poem by
Lewis Carroll Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, poet, mathematician, photographer and reluctant Anglicanism, Anglican deacon. His most notable works are ''Alice ...
which appears in his 1865 novel ''
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' (also known as ''Alice in Wonderland'') is an 1865 English Children's literature, children's novel by Lewis Carroll, a mathematics university don, don at the University of Oxford. It details the story of a ...
''. Though no formal title for the poem is given in the text, the chapter title refers to "A Long Tale" and the
Mouse A mouse (: mice) is a small rodent. Characteristically, mice are known to have a pointed snout, small rounded ears, a body-length scaly tail, and a high breeding rate. The best known mouse species is the common house mouse (''Mus musculus'' ...
introduces it by saying, "Mine is a long and sad tale!" As well as the contribution of typography to illustrate the intended pun in this title, artists later made the intention clear as well. Translators of the story also encountered difficulty in conveying the meaning there, part of which was not recognised until well over a century later.


Content

During the course of the story's third chapter, a Mouse offers to tell
Alice Alice may refer to: * Alice (name), most often a feminine given name, but also used as a surname Literature * Alice (''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland''), a character in books by Lewis Carroll * ''Alice'' series, children's and teen books by ...
his history. "Mine is a long and a sad tale!" he begins, making Alice think that it means its ''
tail The tail is the elongated section at the rear end of a bilaterian animal's body; in general, the term refers to a distinct, flexible appendage extending backwards from the midline of the torso. In vertebrate animals that evolution, evolved to los ...
'', so that she pictures its recitation in the form of a twisted, tail-like shape. In the tale, the Mouse (speaking of itself in the third person) explains how a
cur A cur was a dog breed used by cattle drovers in England. In the United States, a short-haired dog used in hunting and herding is called "cur-tailed", or "cur" for short. In modern speech, the term ''cur'' is usually used to describe a mongrel ...
called Fury proposes the pastime of condemning it to death, himself serving as both
judge A judge is a person who wiktionary:preside, presides over court proceedings, either alone or as a part of a judicial panel. In an adversarial system, the judge hears all the witnesses and any other Evidence (law), evidence presented by the barris ...
and
jury A jury is a sworn body of people (jurors) convened to hear evidence, make Question of fact, findings of fact, and render an impartiality, impartial verdict officially submitted to them by a court, or to set a sentence (law), penalty or Judgmen ...
. "The Mouse's Tale" thus anticipates the nonsense
trial In law, a trial is a coming together of parties to a dispute, to present information (in the form of evidence) in a tribunal, a formal setting with the authority to adjudicate claims or disputes. One form of tribunal is a court. The tribunal, w ...
at the end of the novel:
"Fury said to a mouse that he met in the house, 'Let us both go to law: ''I'' will prosecute ''you''. Come, I'll take no denial: we must have a trial: for really this morning I've nothing to do.' Said the mouse to the cur, 'Such a trial, dear sir, with no jury or judge, would be wasting our breath.' 'I'll be judge, I'll be jury,' said cunning old Fury: 'I'll try the whole cause, and condemn you to death.'"
Although the Mouse claims that the "tale" will explain why he hates cats and dogs, the only villain in the printed poem is a dog; there is no actual explanation for the Mouse's animosity toward cats. However, ''Alice's Adventures Under Ground'', the 1863 handwritten version of Alice in Wonderland, contains a different poem at this point (beginning, "We lived beneath the mat,/ Warm and snug and fat./ But one woe & that/ Was the cat!") which includes both cats and dogs as the enemies of the mice.


Form

The poem foreshadows the 20th century
calligramme A calligram is a set of words arranged in such a way that it forms a thematically related image. It can be a poem, a phrase, a portion of scripture, or a single word; the visual arrangement can rely on certain use of the typeface, calligraphy o ...
in form, being not only in the shape of a tail but, in its handwritten version, allowing the final words to be inscribed upside-down. It has been variously described as shaped, patterned, figured or emblematic verse, in the tradition of such shaping that was later identified as the ancestor of
concrete poetry Concrete poetry is an arrangement of linguistic elements in which the typographical effect is more important in conveying meaning than verbal significance. It is sometimes referred to as visual poetry, a term that has now developed a distinct mea ...
. Carroll had control of the poem's layout in the original edition and it was he who stipulated that the font size should diminish as the poem progressed. Another commentator has explained that in this way “the poem works as a
pictogram A pictogram (also pictogramme, pictograph, or simply picto) is a graphical symbol that conveys meaning through its visual resemblance to a physical object. Pictograms are used in systems of writing and visual communication. A pictography is a wri ...
or concrete poem, in that its actual shape mimics an aspect of its subject matter. A tale told by a mouse is reproduced in the form of a mouse’s tail.” The verbal relationship between the
homonym In linguistics, homonyms are words which are either; '' homographs''—words that mean different things, but have the same spelling (regardless of pronunciation), or '' homophones''—words that mean different things, but have the same pronunciat ...
s tale/tail was later made more explicit by some of the book's illustrators. Thus
Willy Pogány William Andrew Pogany (born Vilmos András Feichtmann (or Feuchtmann); August 24, 1882 – July 30, 1955) was a prolific Hungarian illustrator of children's and other books. His contemporaries include C. Coles Phillips, Joseph Clement Coll, E ...
juxtaposed the poem and a drawing of a mouse on the same page in a 1929 edition. And in
Lisbeth Zwerger Lisbeth Zwerger (born 26 May 1954) is an Austrian illustrator of children's books. For her "lasting contribution to children's literature" she received the international Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1990. Zwerger was born in Vienna in 1954 ...
’s 1999 illustration the statement "Mine is a long and sad tale" is written along the Mouse's tail to make the same point. A student discovery in 1991 that the poem functioned as a "quadruple pun" was later widely reported. As well as the verbal play on tale/tail in the printed text, there were also visual puns in its original handwritten form. By reducing the poem there to its traditional stanza form, the first two are shaped like a mouse's body, with short dashes to indicate its paws, while a third longer line forms the tail. Furthermore, the technical term for the rhyme at the end is tail-rhyme. For the most part, the poem's
page layout In graphic design, page layout is the arrangement of visual elements on a page. It generally involves organizational principles of composition to achieve specific communication objectives. The high-level page layout involves deciding on the ...
is so arranged that the rhyming words occur internally rather than at the end of lines. The rhyme right at the end is therefore truly made the tail-rhyme.


Interpretation

Interpretations of the poem's function divide between finding a serious explanation of its playfulness, or else a more deeply hidden purpose. The former approach sees it as disrupting adult systems of logic, in line with the satire on the justice system in the trial at the end, the realisation of the futility of which finally awakens Alice. Another critic finds in it a summation of the plot of Aeschylus’ ''
Oresteia The ''Oresteia'' () is a trilogy of Greek tragedies written by Aeschylus in the 5th century BC, concerning the murder of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra, the murder of Clytemnestra by Orestes, the trial of Orestes, the end of the curse on the House ...
''. This too centred upon incompatibilities between different conceptions of justice, or between justice and equity.


Translations

Translation of word-play, topical and cultural allusions are notoriously difficult from one language to another, a problem compounded when it is between different cultures.
Warren Weaver Warren Weaver (July 17, 1894 – November 24, 1978) was an American scientist, mathematician, and science administrator. He is widely recognized as one of the pioneers of machine translation and as an important figure in creating support for scie ...
’s study ''Alice in Many Tongues'' (University of Wisconsin, 1964) covered examples in some 42 languages and the strategies used to convey the various elements encountered there. The Chinese translation of 1922, for example, could not match the tale/tail pun but instead substituted an ingenious play on the word ‘sad’ in its place. Since then there have been several comparative studies of versions within a single language, including
Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...
,
French French may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France ** French people, a nation and ethnic group ** French cuisine, cooking traditions and practices Arts and media * The French (band), ...
,
Polish Polish may refer to: * Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe * Polish language * Polish people, people from Poland or of Polish descent * Polish chicken * Polish brothers (Mark Polish and Michael Polish, born 1970), American twin ...
, and Hungarian.


Artistic versions

There have been various vocal settings of the poem, the earliest of which was in Liza Lehmann’s ''Nonsense songs from Alice in Wonderland'', a song-cycle for soprano, contralto, tenor and bass (London 1908).
György Ligeti György Sándor Ligeti (; ; 28 May 1923 – 12 June 2006) was a Hungarian-Austrian composer of contemporary classical music. He has been described as "one of the most important avant-garde music, avant-garde composers in the latter half of the ...
adapted the text as no.8 in his ''Nonsense Madrigals'' (1988–93), and Rena Geli for performance for chamber ensemble and female voice in 2003. Both the original and the printed versions were set as ''Mouse Tales'' for choir and piano by
Bob Chilcott Robert Chilcott (born 9 April 1955) is a British choir, choral composer, conducting, conductor, and singing, singer, based in Oxfordshire, England. He was a member of the King's Singers from 1985 to 1997, singing tenor. He has been a composer ...
(Oxford University Press 2015).OUP
they are performed under the title
"Beneath the Mat" (part 1)
an
"The Trial" (part 2)
on SoundCloud


References

* University of Michigan, ''Curiouser and Curiouser!: Exploring Wonderland with Alice''
"The Mouse’s Tail/Tale"
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mouses Tale 1865 poems Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Poetry by Lewis Carroll Poems about dogs Mice and rats in literature