Date: 13.01.2021
On 28 November, the year 2020’s last meeting of the Artist’s Book Club took place, during which was presented Alice Behind the Scenes (orig. The Westminster Alice) by the British writer and journalist Hector Hugh Munro (1870-1916, better known by the pseudonym Saki) as performed by students of Nadezhda Kazantsev’s Workshop on Literary Translation.
During the presentation, meeting participants discussed the Anglo-Boer war, which served as the basis for the critical work, as well as the close relationship between the text and illustrations created by Francis Carruthers Gould. Some workshop participants noted that it was owing to Gould’s work that it became possible to understand the tone and context of individual fragments of the book, as the writer did not always explain some of the meanings that were obvious to British readers at the end of the 19th century, but that now require encyclopedic knowledge from the reader, to which the illustrations provide clues.
