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...