Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in Italia e i suoi paratesti

The history of the Italian retranslations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland spans one hundred and fifty years, culminating in the polymorphic richness of the dozens of translations that exist today. This article seeks to retrace the tradition of Italian translations of Alice from the perspective of paratexts, shedding light on the relationship between the text and its audiences—adults and/or children—and its textual translators—from the preacher Pietrocòla-Rossetti to the experimental Milli Graffi, from the orthodox Masolino d’Amico to the subversive Aldo Busi—with some reference to its “visual translators”, the illustrators. Starting with the peritexts, the focus will be on the different levels of interpretation or manipulation (whether psychoanalytic, stylistic, cultural, literary, historical or philological) of Carroll’s novel, in order to make sense of a translational trajectory marked by excess.