Eugene Onegin

A Note on the Translation

The Onegin stanza looks like a sonnet, but lacks the sonnet’s traditional antithesis of octet and sestet. It is more a mixture of contrasts of the kind listed in the Dedication. Antithesis and repetition are its building blocks. Pushkin’s poetry has been called a ‘poetry of grammar’.¹ In Onegin, more than elsewhere, the poet plays with a language that is just settling into a standard form. If Pushkin sought a ‘nakedness’ in prose,² he uses the bare elements of grammar – adverbs, conjunctions, interrogatives – to construct the Onegin stanza. Stanza 22 in Chapter I, for example, turns on five repetitions of ‘still’, cut off by a single ‘already’ in the final couplet:

Still cupids, devils, snakes keep leaping

Across the stage with noisy roars;

And weary footmen still are sleeping

On furs at the theatre doors;

There’s coughing still and stamping, slapping,

Blowing of noses, hissing, clapping;

Still inside, outside, burning bright,

The lamps illuminate the night;

And still in harness shivering horses

Fidget, while coachmen round a fire,

Beating their palms together, tire,

Reviling masters with their curses;

Already, though, Onegin’s gone

To put some new apparel on.

Pushkin’s ‘stills’ initiate the lines, which I was unable to follow. Only Nabokov, in his literal translation, reproduces Pushkin’s syntax exactly, which is a useful exercise for showing how the poetry depends on the deployment of grammar, but makes no pretence to be poetic. Repetition and contrast of primary words form an armature for the Onegin stanza. But such words or particles are usually more open-throated than their English equivalents. The Russian conjunctions ‘i’ and ‘a’, for example, meaning ‘and’ and ‘but’, can be repeated melodically, whereas the repetition of their equivalents in translation will be rebarbative. The same holds for the interrogatives ‘when’, ‘what’, ‘which’, all ending in consonants, where their Russian equivalents terminate in vowels: ‘kogda’, ‘shto’, ‘kakoi/kotory’ and can take any number of repetitions. For this reason the structure of the Onegin stanza can easily fall apart in translation.

The iambic tetrameter is an octosyllabic line with a weak and strong beat repeated four times (as in ‘The boy stood on the burning deck’). This is the so-called ‘masculine line’, which has a strong stress on the final syllable. The ‘feminine line’ adds an unstressed syllable (‘The boy stood on the burning vessel’). The Onegin stanza is made up of eight masculine lines and six feminine. It is a succinct line, which can be used more flexibly in Russian because of the greater variety of long and short words. English is more monosyllabic. Any stanza of my translation will have used on the average a third more words than the original. This may be an argument for employing the pentameter (five stresses) instead. It is after all the classic verse of English poetry just as the tetrameter is of Russian. But to do so would miss the cadences of the original and the lightness of Pushkin’s line. One danger of the tetrameter in English is that it can easily degenerate into a jingle as it did in the vers de société of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

There is another technical problem – the ‘feminine’, or unstressed, ending (e.g. ‘rapture’), for which there are relatively few rhymes in English compared with what Russian’s inflected vocabulary offers, so that the translator is too often reduced to using the ‘shon’ words – ‘machination’, ‘domination’ – to which I, too, plead guilty. Instead I have allowed myself near-rhymes: ‘Lyudmila’/’fellow’, ‘service’/’impervious’, ‘Latin’/’smattering’. While feminine rhyming is more problematic, I have also used near or half-rhymes for many ‘masculine’ (stressed) endings, where I thought an exact rhyme would constrain the meaning: ‘live’/‘love’, ‘face’/’peace’, ‘Muse’/’joys’. These two practices have been customary in English poetry since at least the start of the last century. I have noticed an excess of padding and distortion in previous translations that keep resolutely to exact rhyming. But not every half-rhyme is euphonious, and in the end I’ve had to rely on my ear. In the metre too I have introduced the irregularity of a trochee (strong beat/weak beat) at the beginning of a line, again in common with poetic usage, certainly since Shakespeare. Although I am familiar with previous translations, at no point in my own did I consult them, but from Nabokov’s literal version I borrowed several phrases.

My translation succeeds the earlier Penguin version by Charles Johnston,³ which was the first to put Pushkin’s poem on the map in English-speaking countries, inspiring Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate and other imitations. Yet its aura is old-fashioned like those autumnal productions of Chekhov that once flourished on the British stage. The first major translator of Onegin, Oliver Elton (1937),⁴ mourned the ‘nobleness’ that had vanished from English literature by 1880 and found most nineteenth-century Russian writers unhealthy and repellent. Pushkin was an oasis for him – light, gay and authentically religious, unlike Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. But there is little lightness about his translation, which is full of eighteenth – or early nineteenth-century phraseology – ‘thou’, ‘thee’, ‘tis’, ‘twas’, ‘fain’, ‘nay’ and many inversions and contortions. It might perhaps be argued in favour of such a diction that, since Onegin is about the squirearchy and nobility at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a period flavour is appropriate. However, Pushkin’s language is modern by comparison with Elton’s and is felt to be modern in Russia today.⁵

Elton, a professor of English who taught himself Russian, had family roots in the landed gentry, and Johnston was a diplomat married into the Russian aristocracy. The latter’s verse novella Talk About the Last Poet (1981) recalls a vanishing idyll set in France during the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West. In his Preface he insists that he feels no nostalgia about the more immediate demise of the British Empire, and yet, with evident approval, quotes a ‘distinguished critic’ who describes him as its ‘last poet’. Does not a similar hankering take him to Onegin, likewise an idyll destroyed? Johnston is not as backward-looking as Elton but, like him, though certainly not to the same extent, he poeticizes Pushkin’s language, blurring its precision.

The critic John Bayley, who introduced Johnston’s translation, had already reinforced this eighteenth-century image of Pushkin in 1971 in his Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary,⁶where, in order to familiarize anglophone readers with the Russian poet, he had aligned him with Jane Austen and Laurence Sterne, pointing out perceptively that all three authors shared a pre-modern, pre-professional, pre-realist mode of writing. But whether their work relies purely on convention and artifice, as he argues, is another matter. Pushkin adored Sterne, whom he read in French, and Onegin’s devious manner of storytelling may remind us of him. But Bayley’s comparison is really more formalist than historical, since he finds a similar use of convention and artifice in a long range of writers from Chaucer to Joyce and owes much of his interpretation to the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky, who, in 1923, described the novel as a Sternean game with the plot.⁷ Today, in Western academic circles, this tradition, now more complex and innovative, has become the prevailing wisdom. Avant garde critics in Russia have now gone further, crowning Pushkin as the first Russian postmodernist.

This development was anticipated in 1964 by Vladimir Nabokov who asserted that Pushkin’s characters were no more than stylized impersonators of figures in Western literature and that the only Russian element of importance in the novel was the language. His translation is a hybrid of ‘period’ and artifice. For every historically specific word in the original he finds or invents a corresponding archaism or neologism (‘mollitude’, ‘dulcitude’, ‘juventude’, ‘ancientry’, ‘buttsome’) which few, if any, readers will have encountered. In this aestheticizing of the past Nabokov anticipates the postmodern translation of the American Douglas Hofstadter.⁹ While Nabokov still holds the text sacrosanct, apart from his bizarre archaisms, Hofstadter turns it into a quarry of personal interpolations and alterations, retaining only stanza, rhyme and metre, all, he assures us, in a Pushkinian sense of fun.

I have attempted in my translation to write in a contemporary idiom that avoids the antiquarian or the modern/postmodern. As far as the period translation is concerned, I am at one here with the American James Falen, who remarked of his admirable 1995 version of Onegin that he aimed ‘to adapt the rhythms of the poem to the rhythms of English speech’ today and to avoid ‘the sorts of inversions and verbal contortions’¹⁰ that in his view marred the earlier translations. Only in a few cases have I introduced dated words like ‘ere’, ‘o’er’, ‘midst’, and then for metrical reasons. The rhyming and metrical format of Onegin declares that it is a historical work. It is not a form that is common today. We rhyme much less today. There is no need to imitate poets of the past in order to give a historical sense to Onegin. I was once counselled in Russia to render Pushkin’s various styles into equivalents from English poetry, but that would have turned the translation into a Nabokovian artefact. It is very tempting to adopt the manner of Byron’s Don Juan, especially since it was Byron’s poem that set Pushkin going. But it would miss the lyrical depth and what an acquaintance once described to me as the ‘homeliness’ of Pushkin, who in any case, soon turned against the English poet. It would also miss Pushkin’s classical compactness. On the other hand, it is extremely difficult to render the multiplicity of styles in Onegin, which are embedded in history, and which require a commentary. Pushkin helps by parodying these styles and so bringing them into relief. The same is true of the constant epithets accompanying his characters. These are convenient stepping-stones for a translator. In present-day syntax they will stand out and evoke the flavour of the original without lapsing into the archaic. Best of all is to be able to reproduce Pushkin’s simplicity, tangibility and precision, then the problem falls away and he appears as our contemporary.

The idea for my translation originated in a series of seminars held in the Literature Department of the University of Essex in 1966, when Pushkin was much less known in Britain than he is now and considered untranslatable for some of the reasons given above. A group of us, questioning this and the notion of untranslatability as such, undertook a collective translation of Eugene Onegin. Our poet-professor, Donald Davie, was to provide the verse. The project failed and Davie died, but without his initiative I should never have embarked, many years later, on the present version, of which I’ll remark, adapting Pushkin’s lines:

I’ve scrutinized it all for any

Discrepancies – and there are many,

But any wish to change them now

My publisher will not allow

(see Chapter One, stanza 60)

NOTES

1. poetry of grammar: See Roman Jakobson, Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), pp. 37–47.

2. ‘nakedness’ in prose: Pushkin talks of ‘the charm of naked simplicity’, Polnoye sobranie sochinenii, izd. AN SSSR (1937–50), vol. 11, p. 121.

3. Eugene Onegin, trans. Charles Johnston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).

4. Evgeny Onegin, trans. Oliver Elton (London: The Pushkin Press, 1943).

5. A. D. Briggs produced a ‘revised translation’ in 1995, which does not essentially change the nature of Elton’s version (Alexander Pushkin, Yevgeny Onegin, edited with revised translation by A. D. P. Briggs, based on a translation by Oliver Elton, illustrated by M. V. Dobujinsky (London: Everyman, 1995)).

6. John Bayley, Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary (London: Cambridge University Press, 1971).

7. Viktor Shklovsky, Ocherki po Poetike Pushkina, Evgeny Onegin (Pushkin i Stern) (Berlin: Epokha, 1923), pp. 199–220.

8. Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, translated from the Russian with a Commentary by Vladimir Nabokov (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964).

9. Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, trans. Douglas Hofstadter (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

10. to adapt the rhythms… verbal contortions: James E. Falen, Alexander Pushkin: A Novel in Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. xxviii.