Lewis Carroll is a pen-name: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was the author's
real name and he was lecturer in Mathematics in Christ Church, Oxford.
Dodgson began the story on 4 July 1862, when he took a journey in a
rowing boat on the river Thames in Oxford together with the Reverend
Robinson Duckworth, with Alice Liddell (ten years of age) the daughter
of the Dean of Christ Church, and with her two sisters, Lorina (thirteen
years of age), and Edith (eight years of age). As is clear from the poem
at the beginning of the book, the three girls asked Dodgson for a story
and reluctantly at first he began to tell the first version of the story
to them. There are many half-hidden references made to the five of them
throughout the text of the book itself, which was published finally in
1865. "Ailis's Anterins i the Laun o Ferlies" is a translation of Lewis
Carroll's classic tale into synthetic Scots. Synthetic Scots is the name
given by the poet Hugh Mac-Diarmid to a project that sought to rescue
Scots as a serious literary language from the cloying sentimentalism and
the music-hall self-mockery into which it had degenerated by the early
20th century. This project was prefigured in the work of writers like
Violet Jacob and Marion Angus, Robert Louis Stevenson and George Douglas
Brown. Alongside Mac-Diarmid, the project was pursued by Robert Garioch,
Alastair Mackie, Alexander Scott and Sydney Goodsir Smith; while, in
more recent times, Edwin Morgan's transla-tions of European poetry are
among the most powerful examples that we have of synthetic Scots.
"Ailis's Anterins i the Laun o Ferlies" is offered as a contribution to
the canon of synthetic Scots texts. Because the original is such a
popular and well-loved tale, skillfully crafted in simple, clear and
undemanding language, but losing none of its literary excellence for all
that, the hope is that Ailis will contribute to making Scots more
accessible to both Scottish and non-Scottish readers alike.
