iad58 | Beasts of a Feather (Reply)

They very soon came upon a Gryphon, lying fast asleep in the sun. (If you don't know what a Gryphon is, look at the picture.)

—Chapter 9, ‘The Mock Turtle's Story’

A Gryphon is a beast with a lion's body and an eagle's head and wings, and this is how Tenniel drew him.

The first and still most popular Bulgarian translation, by Lazar Goldman, has a Condor in lieu of the Gryphon. Readers are instructed to look at the picture if they don't know what a Condor is. Illustrators have to follow suit.

I never quite understood the reason for the change (then again, no one quite knows why Carroll chose a Gryphon in the first place). Mayhap Goldman thought the Gryphon was too legendary a creature for Bulgarian readers, and Condors be legendary enow (the Andes are a long way away).

But now I dug out that same first edition of Goldman's translation (1933), and it got me thinking.

The illustrations are by Mabel L. Attwell. But the lazy creature has no lion's body. A large diurnal bird of prey from beak to talons. An eagle or vulture, or a condor, if you wish.

Mabel Lucie Attwell, however, was English. And her Alice was out in 1910. Why did she draw a bird rather than a bird-mammal hybrid, and did she thereby compel Goldman to make the Gryphon a Condor (and to oblige all his future illustrators to follow suit)?

Incidentally, Attwell's illustrations are also used in a Roumanian 1958 edition, and there the creature is made into a zgripţor, ‘a bird of tales and myths, of colossal dimensions, which helps Prince Charming to come back from the other realm’ (Wikipedia). Looks like a good way to handle the bird.