variously described as shaped, patterned, figured or emblematic verse, in the tradition of such shaping that was later identified as the ancestor of concrete poetry. Carroll had control of the poem's layout in the original edition and it was he who stipulated that the font size should diminish as the poem progressed. Another commentator has explained that in this way “the poem works as a pictogram or concrete poem, in that its actual shape mimics an aspect of its subject matter. A tale told by a mouse is reproduced in the form of a mouse’s tail.” The verbal relationship between the homonyms tale/tail was later made more explicit by some of the book's illustrators. Thus Willy Pogány juxtaposed the poem and a drawing of a mouse on the same page in a 1929 edition. And in Lisbeth Zwerger’s 1999 illustration the statement "Mine is a long and sad tale" is written along the Mouse's tail to make the same point. A student discovery in 1991 that the poem functioned as a "quadruple pun" was later widely reported. As well as the verbal play on tale/tail in the printed text, there were also visual puns in its original handwritten form. By reducing the poem there to its traditional stanza form, the first two are shaped like a mouse's body, with short dashes to indicate its paws, while a third longer line forms the tail. Furthermore, the technical term for the rhyme at the end is tail-rhyme. For the most part, the poem's page layout is so arranged that the rhyming words occur internally rather than at the end of lines. The rhyme right at the end is therefore truly made the tail-rhyme. Interpretation Interpretations of the poem's function divide between finding a serious explanation of its playfulness, or else a more deeply hidden purpose. The former approach sees it as disrupting adult systems of logic, in line with the satire on the justice system in the trial at the end, the realisation of the futility of which finally awakens Alice. Another critic finds in it a summation of the plot of Aeschylus’ Oresteia. This too centred upon incompatibilities between different conceptions of justice, or between justice and equity. Translations Translation of word-play, topical and cultural allusions are notoriously difficult from one language to another, a problem compounded when it is between different cultures. Warren Weaver’s study Alice in Many Tongues (University