Boyd's Foreword

There are four good reasons to read and reread Nabokov's translation of Eugene Onegin:

1. It allows unparalleled access, if you are not perfectly at home in Russian, to the greatest poem in Russian, to the greatest work of the greatest poet since Shakespeare, to what for some Russians, including Nabokov, is even "the greatest work of fiction in Russian literature," and the most important work in Russian literary history. Just do no expect easy access.

Wild GEB appears - so fascinating that the authors of so many of my favorite books all despised each other's writing lmao:

The cognitivie scientist Douglas Hofstadter in 1997 published Le Ton beau de Marot: In praise of the Music of Language, a long, passionate, and playful defense of the ned for verse translation to respect the formal constraints observed by the original poet. He demonized Nabokov–"the rabid Nabokov," "the devil," "the implacably Nazistic Nabokov"–for insisting on translatable sense rather than the illusion of equivalence. Two years later, on the bicentenary of Pushkin's birth and the centenary of Nabokov's Hofstadter published his own verse translation of Eugene Onegin.

Flying blind otherwise, I appreciate the contextualization of what sits in hand, and am increasingly excited that the relatively brief versed novel does not begin for another 90 pages of critical preface.

One of the great charms of Pushkin–something no other poet can match–is the sense that he comes at whatever he finds in life without hesitation, savors it to the full, masters it, and moves on. This surely is the secret of what Edmund Wilson calls Pushkin's "infinite sympathy and his equally universal detachment": one moment he can be in Tatiana's and Onegin's predicament; the next he can suddenly cut off to bring the scene of the feast to vivid life, and then soar away in playful recollection to a passionate moment in his own life, before once more returning in the next stanza to the pop and fizz of the party.

Nabokov's Foreword

Attempts to render a poem in another language fall into three categories:

(1) Paraphrastic: offering a free version of the original, with omissions and additions prompted by the exigencies of the form, the conventions attributed to the consumer, and the translator's ignorance. Some paraphrases may possess the charm of stylish diction and idiomatic conciseness, but no scholar should succumb to stylishness and no reader be fooled by it.

(2) Lexical (or constructional): rendering the basic meaning of words )and their order). This a machine can do under the direction of an intelligent bilinguist.

(3) Literal: rendering, as closely as the associative and syntactical capacities of another language allow, the exact contextual meaning of the original. Only this is true translation.

It is so fun to know that nab was working on this translation during/between Lolita and Pale Fire. The precision of language, the appreciation of poetry, his love of Pushkin and hatred of critics of his own translation shines through in so many passage of the latter novel. In this lengthy foreword, he is biting:

I have been always amused by the stereotyped compliment that a reviewer pays the author of a new translation." He says: "It reads smoothly." In other words, the hack who has never read the original, and does not know its language, praises an imitation as readable because easy platitudes have replaces in it the intracacies of which he is unaware. "Readable," indeed! A schoolboy's boner mocks the ancient masterpiece less than does its commercial poetization, and it is when the translator sets out to render the "spirit," and not the mere sense of the text, that he begins to traduce his author.

I have always envied the writer who ends this kind of foreword with a glowing tribute to Professor Advice, Professor Encouragement, and Professor Every-Assistance. The extension of my own thanks is more limited, but their temperature just as high. I owe them to my wife, who suggested many improvements, and to my son, who made a preliminary index . . .

Translator's Introduction

Nowadays–an unheard-of case!–the foremost French writer is translating Milton word for word and proclaiming that an interlinear translation would be the summit of his hard, had such been possible.

–Pushkin, from an article (late 1836 or early 1837) on Chateaubriand's translation Le Paradis perdu, Paris 1836.

literally was thinking about PL as an equivalent challenge for literal translation and it appears as though both Nabokov and Pushkin beat me to the associative punch. So cool.

Another "what a time to be alive" book as well, as Nabokov expresses frustration at political blockades preventing full access to Pushkin's MSS necessary for a complete comprehension:

I have translated in my notes all the most important and interesting rejections as given in various publications, but I am fully aware that no adequate study of original texts can be accomplished before all Pushkin's MSS preserved in Russia are photographed and made available to scholars, and this, of course, a cagey police state cannot be expected to do without some political reason–and I can see none yet.

The MSS became available in 1995 after major international collaboration between the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) in St. Petersburg and a British consortium. The full Complete Working Notebooks of Alexander Pushkin were published in a high-fidelity, eight-volume facsimile edition, allowing the world to finally see the physical pages, complete with Pushkin's edits, inkblots, and iconic profile sketches drawn in the margins of his MS for EO.

Nab summarizes the plot/setting better than I'll ever be able to:

The novel is mainly concerned with the emotions, meditations, acts, and destinies of three men: Onegin, the bored fop; Lenski, the minor elegiast; and a stylized Pushkin, Onegin's friend. There are three heroines: Tatiana, Olga, and Pushkin's Muse. Its events are placed between the end of 1819, in St. Petersburg (chapter One), and the spring of 1825, in St. Petersburg again (Chapter Eight). The scene shifts from the capital to the countryside, midway between Opochka and Moscow (Chapter Two to the beginning of Seven), and thence to Moscow (end of Seven). The appended passages from Onegin's Journey (which were to be placed between Chapters Seven and Eight) take us to Moscow, Novgorod, the Volga region, the Caucasus, the Crimea, and Odessa. ... Pushkin's composition is first of all and above all a phenomenon of style, and it is from this flowered rim that I have surveyed its sweep of Arcadian country, the serpentine gleam of its imported brooks, the miniature blizzards imprisoned in round crystal, and the many-hued levels of literary parody blending in the melting distance. It is not "a picture of Russian life"; it is at best the picture of a little group of Russians, in the second decade of the lat century, crossed with all the more obvious characters of western European romance and placed in a stylized Russian which would disintegrate at once if the French props were removed and if the French impersonators of English and German writers stopped prompting the Russian-speaking heroes and heroines. Te paradoxical part, from the translator's point of view, is that the only Russian element of importance is this speech, Pushkin's language, undulating and flashing through verse melodies the likes of which had never been known in Russia. The best I could do was describe in some of the comments special samples of the original text.

Then, humbly deriding himself and thus all the other inferior translations floating about, he concludes his introduction:

It is hoped that my readers will be moved to learn Pushkin's language and go through EO again without this crib. In art as in science, there is no delight with the detail, and it is on details that I have tried to fix the reader's attention. Let me repeat that unless these are thoroughly understood and remembered, all "general ideas" (so easily acquired, so profitably resold) must necessarily remain but worn passports allowing their bearers short cuts from one area of ignorance to another.

What follows after the "formal" introduction is a series of sections detailing the structure, genesis, and publication history of EO, in which Nabokov chides Pushkin for his failure to to destroy any vestiges of unpublished material for, due to his genius, posterity is obliged to consume the unfinished works for any trace residue of the intoxicating words left by the poet:

Rough drafts, false scents, half-explored trails, dead ends of inspiration, are of little intrinsic importance. An artist should ruthlessly destroy his manuscripts after publication, lest they mislead academic mediocrities into thinking that it is possible to unravel the mysteries of genius by studying canceled readings. In art, purpose and plan are nothing; only the result counts. We are concerned only with the structure of the published work, for which the author is alone responsible insofar as it was published within his lifetime. Last-minute alterations or those forced by circumstances–no matter what motives affected him–should stand if he let them stand. Even obvious misprints should be treated gingerly; after all, they may be supposed to have been left uncorrected by the author. Why and wherefore he did this or that is beside the point. We can invoke a change of plan, or an absence of plan, and –instead–the teleological intuition of genius; but these are matters of a metaphysical order. It is, let me repeat, the structure of the end product, and of the end product only, that has meaning for the student–or at least this student–confronted with a master artist's work.

He continues later on:

From many points of view, historical and human, psychological and philosophical, the omitted verses are of tremendous interest, and some of them rival, and perhaps surpass the greatest passage in the established text. As Pushkin's historian, I gloat over them. As a fellow writer, I deplore the existence of many trivial scribblings, stillborn drafts, and vague variants that Pushkin should have destroyed. In a number of instances an omitted line, the place of which seems still warm and throbbing in the established text, explains or amplifies something of great artistic value, but I insist that these specious additions should be discounted in our judgement of EO as Pushkin published it. In a few instances we feel dreadfully certain that only the grotesque requirements of a despotic regime forced our poet to delete passages, to alter lines of development, to abolish whole sets of marvelous stanzas; but we are also aware that if today, in modern Russia, discarded stanzas such as the fragment of "Chapter Ten" are affixed by editors to the established text this is done under the pressure of an even more despotic and grotesque regime. We are acutely conscious of the fact that a living author's work may be published in a form he would have objected to under conditions of political freedom. And still the established text must stand. Indeed, there would be scarcely one masterpiece left untampered with and unchanged from beginning to end if we started to republish a dead author's works in the form we think he might have wished them to appear and endure.

EO

Of the poem itself, I actually have little to say. Need to learn Russian first, I guess. It is hard for me to appreciate Pushkin's style in this format, which I think is part of what makes it such a great Russian poem. It is still a good story, to be sure, but because it falls flat in English as a poem, I am left wanting for native comprehension. Similar experience reading e.g. Butler's translation (which un-versifies) the Iliad and Odyssey. I can tell that I'm missing something which would have been present in the original Greek/Russian, whether it be metrical or rhyme based. The diction I can trust, but diction in verse maketh a goated story not!

Observations of note:

Pushkin was heavy on "shade" especially in Chapter Three:

XLI

But finally she sighed

and from her bench arose;

started to go;

but hardly had she turned

into the avenue when straight before her,

eyes blazing, Eugene

stood, similar to some dread shade,

and as one seared by fire

she stopped.

In "Chapter Four" there is obvious precedent of influence upon Zweig for Beware of Pity:

VII

The less we love a woman

the easier 'tis to be liked by her,

and thus more surely we undo her

amid seductive toils.

After being as anal about LITERAL preservation of the original meaning, we arrive at stanza XXXI in Chapter Five only for Nab to drop this bomb:

Tragiconervous scenes,

the fainting fits of maidens, tears,

long since Eugene could not abide.

That word does not really appear anywhere else in the English language. Still.

In Chapter Seven:

XXII

Although we know that Eugene

had long ceased to like reading,

however, several works

he had exempted from disgrace:

the singer of the Giaour and Juan,

also with him, two or three novels

in which the epoch is reflected

and modern man

rather correctly represented

with his immoral soul,

selfish and dry,

to dreaming measurelessly given,

with his embittered mind

boiling in empty action

Nice juxtaposition of reactions from Tatiana during the dinner party in Chapter Five and where we find her, matured and impassive towards EO in Chapter Eight:

XVIII

... The princess looks at him . . .

and whatever troubled her soul,

however greatly she might have been

surprised, astounded,

nevertheless nothing betrayed her,

in her the same ton was retained,

her bow was just as quiet

We can compare Onegin's reaction to being rebuffed to that of Pechorin, another great Russian, Byronic hero:

XXII

...

The word come not

form Onegin's lips. Ill-humored,

awkward, he barely, barely

replies to her

. His head

is full of a persistent thought.

Persistently he gazes: she

sits easy and free.

He's getting beasted on here, deservedly so.

XXVII

...

O humans! All of you resemble

ancestress Eve:

what's given to you does not lure,

incessantly the serpent calls you

to him, the mysterious tree:

you must be offered the forbidden fruit,

for Eden otherwise is not Eden to you.

Finally, perhaps my favorite Nabokovian ester egg is his 24 note to the poem addressing Chapter Four stanza XLII:

The gladsome crew of boys

cut with their skates resoundingly the ice;

I can only imagine how this may have been mistranslated for Nab affixed the note:

24. "This signifies," remarks one of our critics, "that the urchins are skating." Right.

as if it is incomprehensible that the couplet could describe anything else. In Canto one of Pale Fire, he capitalizes on this critic's trouble with these verses, describing a similar skating motion of Shade's bike:

I never bounced a ball or swung a bat.

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain

By feigned remoteness in the windowpane.

I had a brain, five senses (one unique),

But otherwise I was a cloutish freak.

In sleeping dreams I played with other chaps

But really envied nothing—save perhaps

The miracle of a lemniscate left

Upon wet sand by nonchalantly deft

Bicycle tires.

good luck with lemniscate!

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