The object of the study is the new poetics of French prose of the late 19th — first half of the 20th century and its functioning in the system of Russian translation. The focus is on texts in which the artistic effect is created not so much by the plot composition, but through the syntactic structure, rhythmic organization and intonational heterogeneity. The study is based on the works of such authors as Marcel Proust and André Gide, whose texts are dominated by extended periods, grammatical deviations from the norm, associative logic of the statement and elements of "inner speech". These features complicate translation from French into Russian, where the focus on logical completeness, clarity of syntax and normative design of the text traditionally prevails. In this regard, translation is considered as a form of secondary poetics, capable of both preserving and transforming the original structure. The methodological basis of the study is a linguistic and comparative translation analysis of the original and translation with an emphasis on syntactic-intonational transformations, as well as elements of the functional and rhythmic approaches. The novelty of the study lies in the fact that the emphasis is not on the lexical-semantic, but on the rhythmic-syntactic aspects of translating a literary text. The main conclusions of the analysis are as follows: the structure of the utterance plays the role of a poetic category in modernist prose, and in Russian translation these elements are often simplified or leveled. A special contribution of the author is the identification of patterns of adaptation of intonational and rhythmic structures in interlingual translation. The main conclusions of the conducted analysis are the following: the structure of the utterance plays the role of a poetic category in modernist prose, while in Russian translation these elements are often simplified or leveled. The author's special contribution is the identification of patterns of adaptation of intonation and rhythmic structures in interlingual translation.