On 11 Apr 2011, at 01:31, Stephen Rice wrote:

> A few problems here:
> 
> 1. How many learners are "really interested" in the language they're learning? Interested, yes; but "really interested"? Interested enough to read a text that they ordinarily wouldn't read in their own language? Maybe if it's short. A novel? Probably not. (Likewise would-be translators are likely to get bogged down in a longer work.)

Nobody has a crystal ball. A translator will stick with it or not. Readers will read or not. 

> 2. Several short translations in diverse genres are more likely to give a learner something he might read in his own language--and thus will be willing to read for its own sake in an auxlang.

If you think that a learner's attention span is really short, maybe so.

> Several short translations can reach a larger audience than a single long one.

Unless people are inspired to buy a whole book because they think it is very cool. 

> 3. One of the reasons few read the classics--even those of their native language--is that classics are often long.

Alice isn't. It's 12 reasonably-sized chapters. 

> Length is intimidating. If you see a long text in a language you're familiar with you may decide not to bother. How much worse in a new language!

You forget the warm and fuzzy feeling that a reader will have when he or she has finished reading A WHOLE NOVEL in a language. 

> However--not all classics are long. We should largely ignore Dickens (except for _A Christmas Carol_, perhaps). But what about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? It's well-known and relatively short. Or Wells' _The Time Machine_ (also fairly short)? A quick check of public-domain classics should turn up several more of similar length.

I really get the impression you aren't familiar with these texts. Here's a chapter from The Time Machine, taken randomly from somewhere in the middle:

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'Again, the exclusive tendency of richer people—due, no doubt, to the increasing refinement of their education, and the widening gulf between them and the rude violence of the poor—is already leading to the closing, in their interest, of considerable portions of the surface of the land. About London, for instance, perhaps half the prettier country is shut in against intrusion. And this same widening gulf—which is due to the length and expense of the higher educational process and the increased facilities for and temptations towards refined habits on the part of the rich—will make that exchange between class and class, that promotion by intermarriage which at present retards the splitting of our species along lines of social stratification, less and less frequent. So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour. Once they were there, they would no doubt have to pay rent, and not a little of it, for the ventilation of their caverns; and if they refused, they would starve or be suffocated for arrears. Such of them as were so constituted as to be miserable and rebellious would die; and, in the end, the balance being permanent, the survivors would become as well adapted to the conditions of underground life, and as happy in their way, as the Upper-world people were to theirs. As it seemed to me, the refined beauty and the etiolated pallor followed naturally enough.
=====

I don't know how translator-friendly this is. Here's a longish paragraph from Jekyll and Hyde:

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I was stepping leisurely across the court after breakfast, drinking the chill of the air with pleasure, when I was seized again with those indescribable sensations that heralded the change; and I had but the time to gain the shelter of my cabinet, before I was once again raging and freezing with the passions of Hyde. It took on this occasion a double dose to recall me to
myself; and alas! Six hours after, as I sat looking sadly in the fire, the pangs returned, and the drug had to be re-administered. In short, from that day forth it seemed only by a great effort as of gymnastics, and only under the immediate stimulation of the drug, that I was able to wear the countenance of Jekyll. At all hours of the day and night, I would be taken with the premonitory shudder; above all, if I slept, or even dozed for a moment in my chair, it was always as Hyde that I awakened. Under the strain of this continually-impending doom and by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self. But when I slept, or when the virtue of the medicine wore off, I would leap almost without transition (for the pangs of transformation grew daily less marked) into the possession of a fancy brimming with images of terror, a soul boiling with causeless hatreds, and a body that seemed not strong enough to contain the raging energies of life. The powers of Hyde seemed to have grown with the sickliness of Jekyll. And certainly the hate that now divided them was equal on each side. With Jekyll, it was a thing of vital instinct. He had now seen the full deformity of that creature that shared with him some of the phenomena of
consciousness, and was co-heir with him to death: and beyond these links of community, which in themselves made the most poignant part of his distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him and deposed him out of life. The hatred of Hyde for Jekyll, was of a different order. His terror of the gallows drove him continually to commit temporary suicide, and return to his subordinate station of a part instead of a person; but he loathed the necessity, he loathed the despondency into which Jekyll was now fallen, and he resented the dislike with which he was himself regarded. Hence the ape-like tricks that he would play me, scrawling in my own hand blasphemies on the pages of my books, burning the letters and destroying the portrait of my father; and indeed, had it not been for his fear of death, he would long ago have ruined himself in order to involve me in the ruin. But his love of life is wonderful; I go further: I, who sicken and freeze at the mere thought of him, when I recall the abjection and passion of this attachment, and when I know how he fears my power to cut him off by suicide, I find it in my heart to pity him.
=====

It's hard to prefer this to Alice.... unless you just don't like Lewis Carroll. 

While Alice has some puns (fun for the translator) it is also full of lots of lively conversation, has been culturally familiar for since 1865, and isn't burdened by a particular denseness of prose. 

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/