Go ask Alice...how a classic sounds in Yiddish

Joan Braman has been through the looking glass.

It all began during the summer of 2010, when she received a phone call from Jon Lindseth, an award-winning bibliographer, who called on behalf of The Grolier Club, a New York bibliography organization. Mr. Lindseth made a proposition that would lead Ms. Braman on a five-year mission.

She is one of the nearly 200 other writers, translators and scholars enlisted by Mr. Lindseth to translate Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” into 150 languages for “Alice150,” an exhibition Mr. Lindseth has curated commemorating the novel’s sesquicentennial.

Although a worthy candidate for the translation, Ms. Braman had never previously given the novel a full read.

“I don’t think I read it completely until they gave me this assignment and I read it carefully,” she said.

Ms. Braman is not a native Yiddish speaker and does not speak it fluently, although she can read and write the language.

“I went to Yiddish schools from the elementary through the high school level,” she explained. “And then I went to college and I didn’t have a use for it.”

Ms. Braman admits she was a bit skeptical about whether she was the right person for the job.

“At the beginning, I really felt unequal to it because I wasn’t fluent and I didn’t want to put out anything that didn’t represent Yiddish in a good way,” she said. “But on the other hand, being the only one that was willing to do it, I felt it would be a good thing for Yiddish to get it noticed.”

Ms. Braman holds a master’s degree in English literature and worked as a clinical psychologist. The study of Yiddish returned to her life after her son expressed interest in learning some of the language and Ms. Braman decided to challenge herself with translations.

“I thought it would be a good idea to try translating something into Yiddish, like a poem. So I tried one myself,” said Ms. Braman who mastered an English-to-Yiddish translation of Shelley’s “Ozymandias.”