The difficulties associated with translating nonsense have led polyglot George Steiner to pronounce nonsense untranslatable. Less drastically, philosopher and nonsense theorist Jean-Jacques Lecercle has suggested that nonsense might be a strictly Western phenomenon. “I may conceive,” he writes, “of Russian, or Renaissance, nonsense, but is there any sense in talking of Japanese nonsense?” Having examined the linguistic conventions of Victorian nonsense, Lecercle speculates that non-Western cultures and languages could lack the resources necessary for reproducing nonsense of the sort found in “Jabberwocky.” It should be noted that if Japanese is incapable of such reproduction, then Chinese doesn’t stand a chance. Written Chinese lacks hiragana and katakana, the Japanese syllabaries employed to “spell” new words and foreign names for which there are no kanji (Chinese characters adopted for use in Japanese writing).

A recent Taiwanese edition of Edward Gorey’s The Epiplectic Bicycle appears to confirm this hypothesis. The translator has left epiplectic out of the title entirely, opting for the rather pedestrian Bicycle Story, and his introduction makes no mention of the omission. Is it true, then, that Chinese (if not all non-Western languages) is really incapable of dealing with nonsense words like epiplectic and Jabberwocky?