“You read with laughter and leave in thought”: A.V. Gol’shtein — the first Russian translator of short stories by K. Grahame (The Golden Age (St. Petersburg, 1898); Dream Days (St. Petersburg, 1900))

Abstract

In the following article we shall discuss the first translation into Russian of the “children’s dilogy” by Kenneth Grahame — the collections of stories The Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898), first published by L.F. Panteleev in 1898 and 1900 and translated by Alexandra Vasilievna Gol’shtein (under the pseudonym A. Bauler). These books, which brought the author all-English and European fame, had a significant influence on Russian critical and philosophical thought of the Silver Age. In our study we will try to understand what the role of the translator was in that phenomenon and how accurately she managed to reflect the poetics and style of the Scottish author. To this end, we will consider the artistic means by which the translations were carried out, note the successes and failures of the translator — and see how accurately the original texts reached the Russian reader. Particular attention will be paid to those individual decisions — the choice of individual, emotionally charged vocabulary, the attempt to adequately convey the author’s style and poetics, to play up the allusions, reminiscences, quotations, etc. used by him — that turn out to be a success or a failure for Bauler-Gol’shtein, but are equally characteristic in the context of translation analysis and the theory of cultural transfer.