“Well, the rabbit is not like that”: B. Potter’s literary fairy-tales translated by P.S. Solovyovoya (“Rabbit’s adventures”, “The doll-house”). The second article

This article is a continuation of the work published in the journal “The New Philological Review” (Novyy Philologichesky Vestnik, 2023, No. 3) and develops research in the field of the first translations of the works of the English children’s writer Beatrix Potter into Russian, and also touches on the problem of the formation of the creative identity of a woman translator and a woman writer in Russia and Great Britain in the late 19th - early 20th centuries. This time we turned to two translations (or rather, retellings) - prose and poetic, carried out by A.N. Rozhdestvenskaya and P.S. Solovyova. We examined the various techniques used by the translators, traced how accurately they followed Potter’s original intent, her unique poetics, how they worked with the significant names of the characters, and also analyzed such a technique as the domestication of the author’s illustrations, traces of which are found in both publications. Rozhdestvenskaya’s prose translation is not entirely successful, but it allows us to understand the uniqueness of Solovyova’s approach, who created a poetic retelling of this literary fairy tale. The article pays special attention to Solovyova’s translation, her desire to introduce a biblical substratum into the text, as well as allusions to the writer’s contemporary historical setting, which voluntarily or involuntarily arise in the text, thereby enriching the original material and providing an opportunity for new readings of the fairy tale. In conclusion, the article analyzes the role of work on translations in Solovyova’s literary career and compares her writing strategy with Potter’s.