ABSTRACT
In the third chapter of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, “ Looking-glass Insects,” Alice has crossed a border akin to that which the sleeper crosses entering into a dream-crossed into another world where things cannot be known as they were. In this a-semiotic space where everything forgets itself, we find an apt metaphor for the situation of the foreigner who, entering a new culture, has lost the name for everything he/she knows. In this wood “where things have no names,” Alice meets a fawn with whom she has a curious conversation. There is immediate rapport between these creatures who can identify neither themselves nor each other. Pressed by Alice to divulge his identity, the fawn promises to do so if Alice will come along with him a little further. “I can’t remember here,” he says. The two progress together lovingly, Alice’s arms around the soft neck of the fawn, until they come out of the woods and, in the moment of recognition, the fawn flees at top speed. Terror for the fawn is in the truth words convey to the visible world. Between Alice and the fawn is a dialogue that notionally cannot begin because no one knows who or what his/her interlocutor is. Yet there is a dialogue, there is rapport, and there is even affection. The circumstances of Alice and the fawn are exemplary for those of us who work with poetry today, and particularly in the fleeting space between languages.
