This essay takes Carroll's novel "Through the Looking-Glass" as a starting point to discuss the
experimentation with linguistic material by “Merz” poet and artist Kurt Schwitters. Dwelling on the lyric "AN
ANNA BLUME!" and the reception of the text in Europe after its first publication, the essay will focus on
some translation issues starting, in the first place, with the Italian translations. Far from being 'nonsensical',
the literature of nonsense, of which both Carroll and Schwitters are major exponents, highlights the rich
semantic, sonorous, graphic and typographic multidimensionality of language and emphasises once again
how translation, especially the translation of poetry, or more generally the translation of rhymes, word plays
and idioms, is comparable to a challenge, to the resolution of a riddle to which the various possible solutions
have first been pondered for a long time. However, this is not an impossible challenge as the postulate of
poetry's untranslatability states
