Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland drops a bored Victorian girl down a rabbit hole, among creatures who treat her every remark as a logic trap. Carroll, an Oxford mathematician named Charles Dodgson, first told the story to a real Alice on a boat trip in 1862. It has outlasted the improving children's books of its day by refusing to improve anyone: rules change mid-game, lessons collapse into puns, and adults are ruder than the child they keep correcting.

In Vietnamese this is a book of quick, quarrelsome talk, with winding narration early and rapid one-liners later. The thing to watch is xưng hô. Alice is a polite cháu to the Caterpillar and the Duchess, turns to a stiff tôi and ông with the March Hare, and gets a contemptuous mi from the Queen. Puns like tail and tale cannot cross over, so footnotes explain them; those passages are hardest. The twelve chapters run about 3,000 syllables each.