Contents. Translator's note

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Пушкин. Евгений Онегин (пер. на англ. Ч. Джонстона) *

Translation by Charles H. Johnston.

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This translation first published 1977
Published with minor revisions and an Introduction in Penguin Classics 1979

Made and printed in Great Britain by Hazell Watson & Viney Ltd, Aylesbury, Bucks
Set in Intertype Lectura

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Contents

Introduction by John Bayley 9
Translator's Note 29
Eugene Onegin 35
Notes¹ 234

¹ Notes are at end of each chapter.

Translator's note

Few foreign masterpieces can have suffered more than Eugene Onegin from the English translator's failure to convey anything more than -- at best -- the literal meaning. It is as if a sound-proof wall separated Pushkin's poetic novel from the English-reading world. There is a whole magic which goes by default: the touching lyrical beauty, the cynical wit of the poem; the psychological insight, the devious narrative skill, the thrilling, compulsive grip of the novel; the tremendous gusto and swing and panache of the whole performance.
Vladimir Nabokov's rendering into unrhymed iambics reproduces the exact meaning, but explicitly disclaims any further ambition. While Nabokov admits that in losing its rhyme the work loses its ``bloom'' he argues, irrefutably, that no rhyming version can be literally accurate. It can however certainly strive for something else. It can attempt to produce some substitute for the ``bloom'' of the original, without which the work is completely dead. It can try to convey the poet's tone of voice, whether world-weary or romantic, the sparkle of his jokes, the flavour of his epigrams, the snap of his final couplets. None of these effects can emerge from a purely literal unrhymed translation. In fact, to offset the inevitable loss in verbal exactness, a rhyming version can aim at a different sort of accuracy, an equivalence or parallelism conveying, however faintly, the impact of the original.
Apart from the overall difficulty of his task, the translator with ambitions of this type will find that Pushkin's work presents him with two particular problems.
The brio of the Russian text partly depends on a lavish use not only of French and other foreign words, but of slang and of audacious Byronic-type rhymes. If the translator produces nothing comparable, he is emasculating his original. If he attempts to follow suit, he must do all he can to avoid the pitfalls of the embarrassing, the facetious and the arch. {29}
Secondly, he must be on his guard against the ludicrous effect that the feminine ending (for instance the pleasure/measure rhyme, which is so much derided by Nabokov) can all too easily produce in English. He must not sing, like Prince Gremin in one English version of Chaykovsky's opera:

``I wouldn't be remotely human
Did I not love the Little Woman. ''

(The libretto of the opera, which was written and first performed more than forty years after Pushkin's death, is by Chaykovsky himself and Konstantin Shilovsky, a minor poet of the time. It is nominally based on Pushkin's text, but in fact the relationship is not very close. )
Anyway, it should be possible now, with the help of Nabokov's literal translation and commentary, to produce a reasonably accurate rhyming version of Pushkin's work which can at least be read with pleasure and entertainment, and which, ideally, might even be able to stand on its own feet as English. That, in all humility, is the aim of the present text.

Acknowledgements are due to Messrs. Routledge and Kegan Paul for permission to quote from Vladimir Nabokov's notes in volumes 2 and 3 of his edition of Eugene Onegin (London, 1964. Revised edition, 1976).
I am much indebted to my friends Sir Sacheverell Sitwell, for his interest and support, and Sir John Balfour, for his searching and constructive criticism of the translation; to Professor Gleb Struve, for generously giving me the benefit of his unrivalled scholarship and insight; above all, to my wife Natasha, for her loving encouragement.

C. H. J.
{30}

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