Vladimir Nabokov Problems of Translation: Onegin in EnglishTHIRTEEN Vladimir Nabokov Problems of Translation: Onegin in English I constantly find in reviews of verse translations the following kind of thing that sends me into spasms of helpless fury: Mr. (or Miss) So-and-sos translation reads smoothly. In other words, the reviewer of the translation, who neither has, nor would be able to have, without special study, any knowledge whatsoever of the original, praises as readable an imitation only because the drudge or the rhymster has substituted easy platitudes for the breathtaking intricacies of the text. Readable, indeed! A schoolboys boner is less of a mockery in regard to the ancient masterpiece than its commercial interpretation or poetization. Rhyme rhymes with crime, when Homer or Hamlet are rhymed. The term free translation smacks of knavery and tyranny. It is when the translator sets out to render the spiritnot the textual sensethat he begins to traduce his author. The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase. For the last five years or so I have been engaged, on and off, in translating and annotating Pushkins Onegin. In the course of this work I have learned some facts and come to certain conclusions. First, the facts. The novel is concerned with the afflictions, affections, and fortunes of three young menOnegin, the bitter lean fop, Lenski, the temperamental minor poet, and Pushkin, their friendand of three young ladiesTatiana, Olga, and Pushkins Muse. Its events take place between the end of 1819 and the spring of 1825. The scene shifts from the capital to the countryside (midway between Opochka and Moscow), and thence to Moscow and back to Peters burg. There is a description of a young rakes day in town; rural landscapes and rural libraries; a dream and a duel; various festivities in country and city; and a variety of romantic, satirical and biblio graphic digressions that lend wonderful depth and color to the thing. Onegin himself is, of course, a literary phenomenon, not a local or historical one. Childe Harold, the hero of Byrons romaunt (1812), whose early youth had been misspent in maddest whim, who has moping fits, who is bid to loath his present state by a weariness which springs from all he meets, is really only a relative, not the direct prototype, of Onegin. The latter is less a Muscovite in Harolds cloak than a descendant of many fantastic Frenchmen such as Chateaubriands Rene, who was aware of existing only through a profond sentiment dennui. Pushkin speaks of Onegins spleen or chondria (the English hypo and the Russian chondria or handra represent a neat division of linguistic labor on the part of two nations) as of a malady the cause of which it seems high time to find. To this search Russian critics applied themselves with commendable zeal, accumulating during the last one hundred and thirty years one of the most somniferous masses of comments known to civilized man. Even a special term for One-gins sickness has been invented (Oneginstvo); and thousands of pages have been devoted to him as a type of something or other. Modern Soviet critics standing on a tower of soapboxes provided a hundred years ago by Belinski, Herzen, and many others, diagnosed Onegins sickness as the result of Tzarist despotism. Thus a character borrowed from books but brilliantly recomposed by a great poet to whom life and library were one, placed by that poet within a brilliantly reconstructed environment, and played with by him in a succession of compositional patternslyrical impersonations, tomfooleries of genius, literary parodies, stylized epistles, and so onis treated by Russian commentators as a sociological and historical phenomenon typical of Alexander the Firsts regime: alas, this tendency to generalize and vulgarize the unique fancy of an individual genius has also its advocates in this country. Actually there has never been anything especially local or time-significant in hypochondria, misanthropy, ennui, the blues, Welt-schmerz, etc. By 1820, ennui was a seasoned literary cliche of characterization which Pushkin could toy with at his leisure. French fiction of the eighteenth century is full of young characters suffering from the spleen. It was a convenient device to keep ones hero on the move. Byron gave it a new thrill; Rene, Adolphe, and their co-sufferers received a transfusion of demon blood. Evgeniy Onegin is a Russian novel in verse. Pushkin worked at it from May 1823 to October 1831. The first complete edition appeared in the spring of 1833 in St. Petersburg; there is a well-preserved specimen of this edition at the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Onegin has eight chapters and consists of 5,551 lines, all of which, except a song of eighteen unrhymed lines (in trochaic trimeter), are in iambic tetrameter, rhymed. The main body of the work contains, ap