TOD:When we were kids, my brother collected matchbooks. Grandma wrote, "I'm sending some more matchbooks for Richard. What does Bill collect?" I guess I felt there was something wrong with not collecting anything, and I spent days trying to think of something to collect. I didn't realize at the time that the impulse comes first, the collection after.
But when I was in high school, I read in Clifton Fadiman's introduction to an edition of
Alice in Wonderland, "...you may even find
La Aventuroj de Alicio en Mirlando, which, if you must know, is
Alice in Esperanto." Being a budding Esperantist at the time, I wrote to the Esperanto-Asocio de Nord-Ameriko, and they said they had one copy, in fair condition, and sold it to me for something like a dollar, which was great for a 1911 paperback in actually pretty bad condition. I had it rebound when I was in college, and now you can find it at
Project Guttenberg.
So that began a growing collection of translations of
Alice. Guided by Warren Weaver's
Alice in Many Tongues, I managed to acquire, mainly during the '70s, German, French, Italian, Spanish translations, Vladimir Nabokov's Russian version (not rare in the Dover reprint I have), Czech, Latin, Hungarian, Swedish, Dutch, two different Japanese, a Chinese, and the newer Esperanto translation by Donald Broadribb. I have translated all the poems from the two Alice books into Esperanto, and those versions were on my late, lamented website, and will be again--they were heartily praised by the British Esperanto poet Marjorie Bolton for my rendering of Carroll's British cultural references to equivalents in Esperanto culture.
Along the way, I picked up some versions of
Through Looking-glass, and began accumulating translations of St.-Exupery's
Le Petit prince--in English, Spanish, all the usual culprites, Esperanto, and--joy of joys!--papiamentu, which I happened upon in a bookstore on Aruba.
I have a
Hobbit in Spanish and the complete
Lord of the Rings in William Auld's Esperanto translation. I am lusting after the Latin Harry Potter, but if I start on Rowling, it will never end--her books must be in every language on earth and outsell the Bible regularly.