Surviving as a Plagiarist in Another World - Chapter 23: Alice in Wonderland

< Chapter 23: Alice in Wonderland – 1 >

“Rolls Camel, student.”

“Ye-yes, yessir…! R-Rolls Camel! Present!”

“You don’t need to be so nervous. I’m not that important.”

“N-no, sir!”

Rolls Camel. The wavering girl with short, wavy hair who stuttered in her nervousness was the student from whom I planned to borrow talent for my new work.

“Really. Actually, I need your help, Rolls Camel, which is why I arranged this meeting.”

“R-really…?”

“Yes, yes.”

“Heh, heh-heh… Author Homer needs my help…”

She seemed a bit out of it, but that wasn’t particularly important. After all, a cat only needs to catch mice, and a writer only needs to write well. In that sense, Rolls Camel was the best cat. A seasoned and fierce cat that could catch not just mice but even rabbits.

“Let me get straight to the point. What do you think is lacking in my novels, Rolls Camel?”

“L-lacking?! How could I possibly…?”

“Be honest.”

“…I, I think there’s a slight lack of wordplay? The, uh, grammar and those parts… it feels like you’re focusing too much on the ‘story’ delivery rather than the language… Ah! O-of course, this is just my personal taste… It’s not that Author Homer’s novels are lacking at all!”

“Haha. Thank you for your honesty.”

Rolls Camel was… a genius of wordplay. She had a talent for playing with words and grammar. She could combine math and grammar to express language structurally and, if necessary, she had the skill to create convincing new words.

A natural-born genius with a sense for language.

That was the unique characteristic of the student named Rolls Camel.

“Actually, I think that if your ‘intellectual playfulness’ were included in the novel I’m writing, it would become quite… an amazing work.”

“I’m honored!”

“So, let me ask, do you like fairy tales?”

Before I could finish my question, Rolls Camel’s eyes sparkled and she raised her voice.

“Fairy tales are the best! Among Author Homer’s novels, my second favorite after Don Quixote is The Little Prince! Fairy tales contain the purity of children!”

Rolls Camel continued her praise of fairy tales without even stuttering. In her exultant praise, there was a unique madness of a human immersed in art.

“─So a girl is the most pure and beautiful─, Ah, I-I’m sorry!”

“Keep talking. It’s interesting.”

“N-no, sir!”

It was truly fascinating. The original author of the novel I intended to plagiarize had a personality quite similar to this stuttering girl. Perhaps there was some correlation between a writer’s talent and their human disposition. I found myself wondering about that.

“If you have nothing more to say, that’s fine. The reason I brought up fairy tales is that the novel I plan to write will also be a fairy tale.”

“Huh?! Y-yes! If you would just give me a chance─!”

“So, we’ll write it together….”

“T-thank you!”

Hmm. A collaborative writing project with this student. Would that really be okay…?

* * *

In my past life, I was a translator. A rather competent one, proudly calling myself a ‘translation author.’

The e-books I translated generally received good reviews from readers. But even for me, some works were particularly challenging to translate.

I wasn’t referring to overtly difficult and avant-garde works like Finnegans Wake. Translating such works was more akin to annotation than actual translation.

What I meant were famous and popular works, so renowned that they were cited in humanities, natural sciences, biology, mathematics, logic, and economics. Given that this work was originally written as a fairy tale, one could infer just how… peculiar it was. The name of that famous fairy tale was—

“Alice in Wonderland. That’s the title of the novel we’ll be writing.”

“Y-yes! I think it’s a great title! Hehe….”

Alice in Wonderland.

“I usually determine the story first and then fill in the details later. So, I have a brief outline of the story… and I’d like you to read it and help complete it.”

“Hic! H-Homer’s treatment… H-hehe….”

Alice in Wonderland was an extremely difficult work to translate.

To be precise, any work by the author Lewis Carroll was practically an insurmountable obstacle for translators. This was because Lewis Carroll was a writer who actively used wordplay and coined new words.

For example, the phrase representing the Cheshire Cat, “Was it a cat I saw?” is a palindrome that reads the same backward.

Every sentence in the novel Alice in Wonderland was composed of such linguistic games.

Thus, it was an exceedingly challenging work for translators.

“Would you like to read it first?”

“Y-yes! Hoo-ha, hoo-ha….”

Rolls Camel took the manuscript of “Alice in Wonderland” I had written and began flipping through the pages, breathing heavily. Watching her tremble as if having a seizure was a bit frightening. Was she really going to have a fit?

“Haah… This is the best fairy tale I’ve ever read… H-hihi.”

By the time she turned the last page, Rolls Camel had melted like a wax candle. She slid from her chair and ended up sitting on the floor.

“It’s like transferring a dream onto paper… The transitions between scenes… The paradoxes and puzzles embedded throughout the work… Can someone like me really touch such a masterpiece…?”

Her hands trembled as if she was overwhelmed by the grand role she was about to undertake. But as someone who had seen countless ‘aspiring translation authors,’ I could guess at a certain desire sparkling in her eyes.

“Honestly, you want to rewrite it, don’t you?”

“H-hic, how could I dare─.”

“You want to rewrite it, right? Isn’t that true?”

“…..”

The desire to rewrite sentences. The urge to completely redo the dialogue and narrative to perfectly localize the work. It was a desire any aspiring translation author might feel.

“Yes. Honestly, I want to rewrite it in my own words….”

That desire flickered in Rolls Camel’s eyes as well.

“This pure and dreamy story… If I could rewrite it, tear it apart and rebuild it from scratch! To completely transform it so that the original sentences don’t even resemble their initial form, I think I’d be truly ecstatic….”

“Feel free to rewrite it as much as you want. As long as you don’t change the story.”

“…”

Rolls Camel’s trembling ceased. She brushed off her skirt as she stood up from the floor and sat back in her chair, beginning to read the manuscript anew. But this time, she didn’t read it in order.

She jumped from page to page, contemplating and exploring something.

Occasionally, she made notes on the manuscript with a pen.

If President Dorling, who loved to preserve original manuscripts, saw this, she would have been horrified.

“Um, here… Ah! Author! Could you give me some manuscript paper… or just some blank sheets of paper?”

“Sure.”

I pulled out a stack of blank paper from the drawer and handed it to her.

She immediately began scribbling furiously on the sheets, not appearing to ponder but rather vomiting every sentence that came to mind onto the paper without any particular order.

The ink in her pen ran out three times, and I had to replace it with a new one each time.

She had written an immense amount. The volume of text was at least five times… no, more than ten times the length of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ that I had given her.

“Heh, heheh… Sir, what do you think of this?”

And then, after she had used up all the ink in the fourth pen and organized her writing with the fifth pen, I couldn’t help but be amazed as I read her work.

“The sentences… are incredibly fascinating.”

“Heh, heheh! The story you wrote felt like a dream, so I just expressed that in words!”

She had produced results beyond my expectations. It was a miracle possible only for her, endowed with the talent for language that any writer would envy. The great talent intertwined with the great story of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ had blossomed into a magnificent work.

At this moment, as a translation writer, I was convinced.

“It’s… wonderful. I want to read and savor it over and over again.”

“Heheheh…”

Translating ‘Alice in Wonderland’ beyond this would be impossible.

“Rolls Camel.”

“Yes, yes, sir!”

“It’s excellent.”

“Heh, heheh! Th-thank you!”

I carefully placed the manuscript completed by Rolls Camel into my bag. It seemed that tonight would be a long one. The ‘Alice in Wonderland’ reborn from Rolls Camel’s hands was worth rereading all night long.

* * *

[Alice in Wonderland]

[Authors: Homer, Rolls Camel]

“Gasp! M-my name is right next to Homer’s! Sniff…”

“Congratulations on becoming a great author, Rolls Camel.”