Yevgeny Onegin Read online

  Such examples in our language could easily be multiplied, but we have seen enough to demonstrate one of the trickiest problems of English translation: the besetting danger of verbal rhymes and other hackneyed pairings. All the existing translations, to varying degrees, are diminished by this recurrent disadvantage. (The present one will not be flawless in this respect, though at least it helps to have started out with this danger in mind and with every intention to keep feeble rhyming to a minimum. For example, the first five feminine rhymes of this translation, covering the dedication and the opening of the first stanza, are as follows: amusement/perusal, spirit/fill it/I will it, tragic/pragmatic, insomnia/phenomena, probity/nobody. The justification for such unusual rhymes is given below.)

  But where exactly is the problem? Couldn’t we just refrain from using feminine rhymes, thus following the best English poets? It is not so easy. At least two translations have done exactly that, without success. The very first poetic version of Yevgeny Onegin, by Lt Col. Henry Spalding, came out as early as 1881, with Pushkin scarcely forty years dead; more than half a century would pass before the next translations began to appear, to celebrate the Russian poet’s centenary in 1937. Given the disadvantages under which Spalding laboured (lack of good dictionaries, research materials, and so on) he did a remarkably good job. His work is fluent, accurate and easily readable, though two things stand out as unfortunate. First, his use of our language seems archaic both in the words chosen and in their artificial deployment. For instance, nowhere but in poetry would you write, as Spalding does, “To freeze his finger hath begun…” This is unfaithful to Pushkin, whose language always seems modern and natural even after the passage of so many generations The second defect is more subtle. He has decided, for reasons that will be obvious from our discussion above, to dispense with feminine rhymes. This has an effect that becomes immediately apparent to anyone who can read the original: the rhythmic flow of Pushkin’s poetry has been changed and subverted. The imposition (in English) of snappy endings to lines that are already two syllables shorter than our national favourite (the iambic pentameter) creates a kind of jerkiness and staccato insistence that is slightly unpleasant and humdrum, a sharp contrast to the uncoiling subtlety of the Russian. It is not surprising that of all the subsequent translators only one has reverted to Spalding’s masculine-only style of rhyming; all the others do what they can to preserve the original rhythm. An imaginative attempt to get round this problem by using feminine endings on the usual regular basis but without rhyming them (the first line-ending “úpright” is paired with “respéct him”) certainly keeps to the original rhythm, but at great cost in terms of disappointment with the shape of the stanza (which depends entirely on the disposition of its rhymes).

  There is one way out of this dilemma, which works admirably but may offend the purist because it involves an apparently anachronistic intervention. This is to allow approximate rhyming of the feminine endings (otherwise called near-, half-, off- or embryonic-rhyming). Here the danger is that if you overdo things you risk making the text read like a version of a modernist like Mayakovsky (1893–1930) or even e.e. cummings (1894–1962). Several translators of Yevgeny Onegin have used this device sparingly, risking the occasional rhyme that is slightly imperfect. Thus, here and there, you will encounter thoroughly acceptable rhyming partners like these: before him/decorum, hokey-pokey/trochee, shoulders/soldiers, palace/malice, rum-swirls/Come, girls!, purring/astir in.

  As it happens, the use of approximate rhyming for Pushkin’s period is not quite the anachronism that it may appear to be. If you look closely at the rhyming patterns of English poets in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, you will discover some pleasant little anomalies of approximation that have lain there on the page for centuries unnoticed. (Examples follow; one or two may be due to subsequent changes in pronunciation, but most are true instances of deliberately faulty correspondence.) As far back as Alexander Pope (1688–1744), “the epitome of neoclassicism”, there are inexact rhymes such as air/star, glass/place, devil/civil, beams/Thames, give/believe and foredoom/home. In the work of Thomas Gray (1716–71) you will find flood/god, abode/God, towers/adores, cleave/wave, remove/love, ecstasy/spy, car/bear, sincere/there and bowl/scowl. William Blake (1757–1827) gives us pigeons/regions, field/behold, mine/join, sit/sweet and valley/Melancholy. Coleridge (1772–1834): cold/emerald, thus/Albatross, root/soot, gusht/dust, alone/on and sere/were/there. As for Lord Byron (1788–1824), apart from his obvious jokes with rhyme, such as answering “intellectual” with “hen-pecked you all” and “mathematical” with “what I call”, he will slip in a good number of approximations like Cincinnatus/potatoes, Homer’s/newcomers, already/Haidée, acquaintance/sentence, morsel/a horse ill, Agamemnon/the same one and never/river. Since Pushkin imitated Byron consciously (confident of his ability to tidy and transcend the unkempt genius of the English lord), it seems justifiable for us to indulge in this form of rhyming for our translation, given the dreadful pitfalls of not doing so.

  Unfortunately, the one translator of Pushkin who saw the value and justification of approximate rhyming, Stanley Mitchell (2008), almost invalidates it by what we may describe as misuse. It is, for example, acceptable and enterprising to rhyme like this: sérvice/impérvious, Látin/smáttering, Tánya/mánner, madónnas/ón us and házard/gáthered. These are just what we need—fresh, new, closely associated compilations carrying wit and surprise, far superior to the verbal obviousness so often employed elsewhere. Despite the flavour of anachronism they are fully in tune with Pushkin’s own light touch and constant humour. We could have done with more of them. But where the system breaks down for this translator is his inclusion in the category of approximate rhyming of some words related only by consonants. Consonantal rhyme carries so little impact that it simply does not work. Sometimes called “consonantal dissonance”, it was not used at all before Hopkins, Owen and Dylan Thomas; it is difficult even to detect on the page and has never enjoyed full acceptance or popularity. To use it in relation to Pushkin is truly anachronistic and unsuitably experimental.

  In his welcome discussion of this important subject, Mitchell rightly defends the cause of near-rhyming, but he is surely wrong to suggest that rhyming pairs like these are permissible: Lyudmila/fellow, live/love, face/peace, Muse/joys. These are his own examples, to which we can add from his text unacceptable formulations like: handsome/custom, theatre/Phaedra, orient/imprint, Phyllis/promise, and many more. The difference is palpable and terribly important. Approximate rhymes must carry similarity between their stressed vowels, as in Mitchell’s delightful rhyme between “whispered” and “persisted”, in which the slight lack of correspondence between consonants is completely over-ridden by the stressed “í”. The lack of a vocalic echo leaves not a weak rhyme, it leaves no rhyme at all, and that will puzzle and upset most readers. To make matters worse, this translator uses bad examples of it in the worst possible place, right at the beginning. His opening (feminine) “rhyme” is between “honour” and “demeanour”, and in the second stanza the opening (feminine) rhyme is between “scapegrace” and “póst-chaise”, in which the busy consonants and the unstressed vowels (in “grace” and “chaise”) cannot possibly compensate for the discrepancy between the stressed vowels—you simply cannot claim “scape” and “post” as anything resembling a rhyme. This is a splendid translation overall, and it has rightly received much praise, but the solid principle of approximate rhyming has been undermined by the infringement of a simple rule: such rhyming works only when there is close or exact correspondence between two stressed vowels, whatever the consonants (which can have no stress) may be doing.

  This parading of the faults and pitfalls besetting all translators is intended not as a claim to instant improvement on all that has gone before, but as a demonstration of the difficulty of this task and a tribute to the few brave souls who have attempted it. All of them have worked out of an obsessive love of Pushkin and his masterwork, and each has produced a
version worthy of the original. Some, however, have taken strategic decisions that are hard to live with. For instance, two translations have introduced an impossible anomaly, the use of lower-case letters at line-beginnings. You can see why they wanted to do this—in order to encourage the reader not to stop the sense at the end of the line but to read on fluently to the next one. But we do not do this with Shakespeare or any other English poet, and the text presented without capital letters at the line-beginnings looks like an amazingly modern innovation, quite out of tune with Pushkin and his age. One of the two also repeatedly omits the definite article, thus: “at sound of drum”, “in gondola’s seclusion”, “from pistol’s click”, and so on. Others show too quick a readiness to leap upon an obvious feminine rhyme without realizing how unimpressive it will sound in the overall context.

  The present translation makes no special claim other than to have borne these disadvantages in mind from the outset and tried to avoid some of them some of the time. We seek approval for one slight anachronism, the extensive use of approximate rhyming, on the grounds that this is the only way to avoid the pitfalls of feminine rhyming in English, and that it can be tucked away in the run of poetry in a way that radically altered line-beginnings, for example, cannot be. This apart, our new version of Yevgeny Onegin lines up with earlier versions as nothing more than an equal partner in a richly rewarding endeavour.

  The ultimate test of a poetic translation of a narrative text is to see how it looks when set out in prose. Despite the constraints of rhyme and stanzaic form it ought still to read fluently, almost like prose. It seems appropriate to end with a random example of a stanza from this new translation that is intended to work that way. Here is a modest offering from Chapter Six (34), which would read as follows if set out in prose:

  Imagine this: you with your pistol have murdered someone, a young friend, because some glare, some silly whisper or wrong response chanced to offend your feelings while you drank together, or maybe in his wild displeasure he took offence and challenged you—what is there left for you to do, and will your soul feel any different to see him stretched out on the ground with death depicted on his brow, and even now his body stiffening, as he lies deaf and dumb down there, scorning your cries of wild despair?

  This is poetry, but if it also reads almost like prose we are at least on the way towards a reasonable representation of how Pushkin sounds. Beyond that, we can only hope that, to develop an idea from Jorge Luis Borges, the original doesn’t seem too unfaithful to its latest translation.

  ANTHONY BRIGGS

  PREVIOUS ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF YEVGENY ONEGIN

  Eugene Onéguine: A Romance of Russian Life, translated by Lieut.-Col. [Henry] Spalding (London: Macmillan and Co., 1881).

  Eugene Onegin, translated by Babette Deutsch, in Avram Yarmolinsky (ed.), The Works of Alexander Pushkin (New York: Random House, 1936; reprinted with revisions by Penguin Books, 1964).

  Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, translated by Dorothea Prall Radin and George Z. Patrick (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1937).

  Evgeny Onegin, translated by Oliver Elton (London: The Pushkin Press, 1937; reprinted [as Yevgeny Onegin] with revisions by Anthony Briggs, by Everyman, 1995).

  Evgenie Onegin, translated by Bayard Simmons (London: unpublished typescript, 1950).

  Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, translated by Walter Arndt (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1963).

  Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, translated with a commentary by Vladimir Nabokov, 4 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964).

  Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, translated by Eugene M. Kayden (Yellow Springs, OH: Antioch Press, 1964).

  Eugene Onegin, translated by Charles Johnston (London: Scolar Press, 1977).

  Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, translated with an introduction by James E. Falen (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990).

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

  Eugene Onegin, translated by Tom Beck (Sawtry: Dedalus, 2004).

  Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, translated with an introduction and notes by Stanley Mitchell (London: Penguin Books, 2008).

  YEVGENY ONEGIN

  Pétri de vanité il avait encore plus de cette espèce d’orgueil qui fait avouer avec la même indifférence les bonnes comme les mauvaises actions, suite d’un sentiment de supériorité, peut-être imaginaire.

  TIRÉ D’UNE LETTER PARTICULIÈRE

  He was so steeped in vanity as to display even more the kind of pride, arising from a perhaps misguided sense of superiority, which calls for the acceptance of good and bad behaviour with an equal lack of concern.

  FROM A PRIVATE LETTER

  DEDICATION

  to P. A. Pletnyov (1792–1865)

  Not for the stately world’s amusement,

  But as your friend, I’d have been pleased

  To dedicate for your perusal

  A better pledge, a worthier piece

  Truer to your exalted spirit,

  Brimming with limpid poetry,

  And holy dreams by which to fill it

  With high thoughts, yet simplicity...

  Still, take this pledge. To you I will it,

  A hash of chapters set in rhyme,

  Half-humoristic and half-tragic,

  Some idealistic, some pragmatic,

  The casual fruits of too much time,

  Swift inspirations and insomnia,

  The callowness of withered years,

  Cold, intellectual phenomena,

  A heart, a lifetime, washed with tears.

  CHAPTER ONE

  He rushes life and hurries through emotion.

  PRINCE VYÁZEMSKY

  1

  “Uncle, a man of purest probity,

  Has fallen ill, beyond a joke.

  Respected now, and scorned by nobody,

  He has achieved his masterstroke

  With this exemplary behaviour,

  But it would try the Holy Saviour

  To tend a sickbed night and day,

  And never stir a step away,

  Employing shameful histrionics

  To bring a half-dead man some cheer,

  Plump pillows and draw sadly near,

  Indulging him with pills and tonics,

  Heaving deep sighs, but thinking, ‘Ooh!

  When will the devil come for you?’”

  2

  These were the thoughts of a young gállant,

  Lodged in his dust-blown chaise, whom chance

  (Or mighty Zeus) had willed the talent

  Of family inheritance.

  Friends of Ruslán, friends of Lyudmíla,

  Allow me forthwith to reveal a

  New hero, for this novel, who

  Comes thus unintroduced to you:

  Onégin (we were friends for ages)

  Was born by the Nevá, where you,

  Perhaps, dear reader, were born too,

  Or maybe ran around rampageous.

  I’ve also had some good times there—

  But I can’t breathe that northern air.

  3

  With worthy service now behind him,

  His father lived from debt to debt.

  Three balls a year soon undermined him.

  He was as poor as you can get.

  Fate saved the boy, who was aware of

  Madame, and being taken care of,

  And her replacement, a Monsieur.

  The child was frisky, though demure.

  Monsieur l’Abbé, a Catholic father,

  Not keen to weigh Yevgeny down,

  Taught him by acting like a clown.

  Morals seemed irksome; he would rather

  Chide him for the odd naughty lark,

  And walk him in the Summer Park.

  4

  Rebellious youth came in due season—

  A season full of hopeful dreams

  And gentle sadness—ample reason

 
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