The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe — Esperanto Translation

a blue book (The Chronicles of Narnia) with a picture of a man walking through the woods

Copyright Notice

The original work The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis is public domain in the country where this translation was created. Accessing, distributing, or possessing this translation in a country where the original work is not public domain could be illegal.

About

I started this translation sometime in 2023 after entering the Esperanto Association of Britain’s translation contest for Roald Dahl’s Matilda, which got me interested in attempting a translation of a piece of children’s literature. I ended up settling on C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe because the work remains a classic of children’s literature to this day, and to my knowledge, an Esperanto translation of the book doesn’t already exist; this is likely because the book remains under copyright in many parts of the world.

While the translation itself has been finished since 2024, my first thought was to see if I could obtain the worldwide Esperanto translation rights from HarperCollins to sell and distribute physical copies of the book worldwide. Surprisingly, I did receive an initial response when I pitched the idea; however, it seems their interest in the project quickly disappeared and I have not heard anything for almost a year.

A special thank you to Detlef Karthaus who proofread the manuscript and graciously offered his insight into the translation process.

Colophon

The translation was managed with OmegaT. The manuscript was typeset in LibreOffice. The font is Lexica Hyperlegible.

Fediverse Reactions

Comments

2 responses to “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe — Esperanto Translation”

  1. Deborah Hartmann Preuss, pcc Avatar

    @activitypub @rayckeith C. S. Lewis was a philologist. 🤔 I wonder what he'd make of this.

    1. JRDNZR Avatar

      I’ve never been able to find anything about C. S. Lewis’ thoughts on Esperanto, which is kind of surprising considering his background, and his relationship to Tolkien, who had a somewhat positive view of the language.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *