NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION
If art holds a mirror up to nature, it frequently does soas in this masterpiece of Pushkin'sby first directing that mirror at other works of art. The world of Eugene Onegin derives perhaps as much from Western European literary antecedents and traditions as it does from its author's Russia, and in doing so it provides a paradoxical picture of life mimicking art. The literary translator, in seeking to participate in this international colloquy, holds, as it were, yet another mirror up to these already doubled or tripled mirrors. It is a devilish and tricky business, this game in a house of mirrors, this effort to catch and reflect elusive reflections. There are occasions when the translator, however carefully he tries to grip his own mirror by its edges so as not to smudge the glass, will inadvertently allow his hands to enter the picture and thus obscure the view.
In attempting to reproduce poetry, the verbal art most closely tied to its native language and the most susceptible to distortion in the transfer to another, the translator faces particularly vexing difficulties. Verse, perhaps, can be translated; great poetry is something else. Russian and English poetry do not look, sound, or behave very much alike; and by choosing to work on Pushkin's poem, in which the sheer beauty of sound is so vital a part of its effect and in which all the expressive resources of the Russian language are on masterful display, the translator may find himself casting an uneasy eye at Robert Frost's cautionary definition of poetry as 'what gets lost in translation'. All he can do, having begun, is keep to his task, reassuring himself that both Russian and English, after all, assemble consonants and vowels into sounds and words, into beauty and sense.
Pushkin's long poem has had some seven English translations prior to this one (the more thorough Germans seem to have produced about twelve), and yet it has continued to be regarded
by many as a classic instance of the untranslatable work. Vladimir Nabokov has argued that a literal rendering of Pushkin's sentences is about the best that can be achieved or even honestly attempted; that any translation that retains the original's metre and rhyme, since it cannot be faithful to the work's exact meaning, will necessarily result in a mere paraphrase. In his own translation of the novel, which he proudly labelled #62056; 'pony', he shunned, accordingly, both metre and rhyme and gave us a version at once marvellously accurate and rather peculiar, most of its poetry resident in the accompanying commentary rather than in the translation itself. Pushkin, one has to say, loses where Nabokov gains. And of course a 'literal' version is, in the end, no less unfaithful to its model than a rhymed and metred one: in place of a work whose austere and harmonious shape is an essential part of its effect, it gives us something ill-proportioned and flaccid, a kind of 'formal paraphrase' that seems bland and inert where the original is expressive and alive. But the translator's dilemma doesn't lie, really, in choosing between faithfulness to form and faithfulness to meaning, for in fact neither of these goals, even separately, is attainable. In the transfer of a work from one language to another there are no exact correspondences to be found neither in the meanings and histories of words nor in the intricacies and effects of forms. This very tendency of ours to divide a work of art into separate categories of form and content not only gives a false view of a work's complex nature but also poses the problem of literary translation in a false light.
Confronted with an evident inability to render a work faithfully in either its absolute form or its total sense, the translator, it would seem, faces an impossible task and is condemned by the very nature of his enterprise to an act of compromise and betrayal. The only solution, it seems to me, is for the translator to try to view the work not as a hopeless dichotomy but as a unified whole and to try to be faithful, in some mysterious spirit, to this vision of wholeness. In the result, perhaps we can honour, if nothing else, the poor
translator's quixotic quest, a quest in some respects not unlike that of the artist he seeks to emulate.
The other translators who have put Pushkin's novel into English have chosen, unlike Nabokov, to honour in most respects the 'Onegin stanza' and to retain the original's metrical scheme and rhyme. Two of them in particular, Walter Arndt and Charles Johnston, have done so with some success and have demonstrated thereby that the task may be slightly less impossible than it seems. My own attempt to pursue the elusive Pushkin yet again has profited much by their example, following them in their virtues and avoiding, as far as possible, their defects. If the results presented here are no less provisional than their efforts or the efforts of others that have gone before, I have none the less greatly enjoyed my pursuit of Pushkin and have found the view, even from the lower altitudes, well worth the climb.
I, too, have elected, in my version, to preserve what I could of Pushkin's form, taking the Onegin stanza as one of the novel's most essential and characteristic features, the building-block with which the entire edifice is constructed. By retaining the stanza form that Pushkin uses as his poetic paragraph, the translator positions himself, in a sense, on the work's home ground and imposes upon himself a useful discipline for his journey. Furthermore, he is thereby constrained, as was the poet himself, to seek solutions without self-indulgence, to find variety within oneness, and to earn freedom within the bondage of the form. The very rigidity of the stanzaic structure can bring at times a fruitful tension to the words with which the form is made manifest, and the economy of expression it enforces upon the translator will sometimes reward him with an unexpected gift.
In working, over quite a few years, on several visions and revisions of this translation, I have found myself searching for an ever more natural and unforced flow of language, for a more fluid and straightforward syntax, a lighter and more readily comprehensible style; I have tried to avoid as much as possible
the sorts of inversions and verbal contortions that have marred in my view the earlier translationsall in an effort to capture what seemed to me the poem's spontaneous and unlaboured effect in Pushkin's Russian. I have also tried to adapt the rhythms of the poem to the rhythms of English speecha speech that in my rendition sounds somewhat more American than British in its accent and somewhat more contemporary than period in its idiom. Ultimately, I have attempted to provide the English-speaking reader of today with a more accessible version of one of the great works of the Russian literary imagination, one that would speak in a familiar, not-too-distant English voice and that would convey not only something of the novel's sense and shape, but some hints of its characteristic flavour as welclass="underline" its verve and sparkle, its lyricism and wit, its succinctness and variety: the play of lights and shadows in an imperfect mirror.
A few words on the Onegin stanza. The main body of the novel consists in its final form (some stanzas having been discarded by Pushkin for a variety of reasons) of some 366 stanzas of a common design. The fourteen lines of this stanzaic form suggest, of course, the sonnet, but the rhyming pattern is unique (ababccddeffegg), as is the adherence to a fixed sequence of masculine and feminine rhymes (that is, rhymes in which the stresses fall on the final or the penultimate syllables, respectively): fmfmffmmfmmfmm. The metre, iambic tetrameter, though it may seem somewhat terse for a long narrative poem in English, is hardly in itself alien to our tradition. Composi-tionally, the stanzas are organized in a variety of ways: as a single unit, as octave and sestet, or as three quatrains and a couplet. The second quatrain may function as two couplets (ccdd), and the sestet as two linked tercets (eff egg). The three quatrains, it will be noted, employ in sequence the three possible patterns for a binary rhyme scheme: alternating (abab), balanced (ccdd), and enclosed (effe). Pushkin uses his sonnet-paragraph with great virtuosity and flexibility. The opening quatrain and the closing couplet are usually the