Translating England into Russian: The Politics of Children's Literature in the Soviet Union and Modern Russia by Goodwin Elena (review)

Abstract

SEER, 99, 2, APRIL 2021 344 The book, oddly, lacks a conclusion, which would have been helpful in tying all the strings of Russian-influenced British modernism together. Another frustrating aspect, which appears most prominently in the final chapter, is the number of conjectures (‘possible’, ‘might’) regarding influence for which there is no definitive proof. While intellectually exciting, the pondering of various possibilities is ultimately unproductive, though it does reflect the authors’ meticulousness as they truly leave no stone unturned. Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures Tatiana Kuzmic Harvard University Goodwin, Elena. Translating England into Russian: The Politics of Children’s Literature in the Soviet Union and Modern Russia. Library of Modern Russia. Bloomsbury Academic, London and New York, 2019. xii + 256 pp. Illustrations. Appendices. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £85.00. Soviet children’s stories were written by avant-garde writers and illustrated by avant-garde artists. This literature also served as historical material designed to teach a young generation about Communism. In a similar vein, English children’s stories, as Elena Goodwin traces, for almost a century, ‘supported and promoted educating and bringing culture to the masses, starting from childhood’. Goodwin’s book explores how Russian translations of British children’s literature construct a literary narrative of England and its culture. ‘Translating England’, as Goodwin explores, involves several components. To begin, the notion of Englishness is set apart from the notion of Britishness. Englishness, in many children’s books, is depicted as ‘Merry England’, translated as dobraia staraia Angliia, and appearing mostly in classics of British children’s literature published between the late-Victorian-Edwardian period and the end of World War Two. Russian translations captured this concept as symbolizing comfort and calm, traditions and conservatism, law and order, with attributes such as aristocracy and castles, ladies and gentleman, and hats. Goodwin’s study focuses mainly on works published between the late-Victorian-Edwardian periods and the end of the Second World War. In her study, Goodwin finds that the way Englishness is represented varied according to changes in the political situation in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, and that political ideology played a significant role in the Soviet Union. Her book explores what criteria led to certain books being translated into Russian. Secondly, it explores the literary transfer of images of Englishness from British children’s literature to Russian translation during the Soviet period and how those literary images were preserved or misrepresented in the translated texts. REVIEWS 345 Finally, Goodwin focuses on the reception of history of the translated books in Russia by drawing on media reviews. Chapters one and two present the historical background by highlighting the political, social and cultural environment in which Russian translations of English children’s books were formed. Chapter three includes a larger contextual picture of British books written for children and translated into Russian, in particular those books published between the late-Victorian period and the Second World War. Chapters four to eight analyse the translations in case studies such as Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy (1911) and P. L. Travers’s Mary Poppins (1934). These chapters also include the analysis of pictorial representations of Englishness. One of the central claims of Goodwin’s book is that children’s literature in the Soviet Union was not immune to ideological influences in literary translation. Concerning translation theory, I would like to bring into this study of children’s stories the fact that the USSR was the first place to develop translation theory partly because there had to be one correct way of translating a text. Just as there were conferences that met to discuss Socialist Realist literature, there were also conferences that met in the early Soviet period to discuss rules for translation. Soviet translations reflect the conflict between free and literal translation, which is a major topic in translation studies. It was not literal but free translation that prevailed in the 1930s, allowing the translator to adapt the text to Soviet contemporary audiences (and ideas of Socialist Realism). The meaning of the original should be translated, but the translator should also...