Eugene Onegin (Classics) [Paperback]

Nearly every Russian sees Pushkin as their country's greatest writer. This perception, however, is not shared by many foreigners. The problem, of course, is translation. Pushkin's verse is supremely elegant, witty and musical. Few, if any, great poets are harder to translate.

Charles Johnston's version is not at all bad, and conveys much of Pushkin's wit - though not his lyricism. James Falen's version (Oxford World's Classics) is better still. Stanley Mitchells's long-awaited version (just published by Penguin Classics (2008) is truly outstanding. I enjoyed it every bit as much as the original - something I would never have believed possible. It fully deserves ten stars, but the amazon programme for some reason does not allow me to change the 3 stars I originally gave to a different translation in an earlier version of this review.

Nabokov's criticism of Arndt's translation is sometimes cited as evidence of Johnston's or Falen's version being superior to it. This is a misunderstanding: the thrust of Nabokov's arguments is in fact directed at any form-preserving translation of 'Onegin', and the only reason his wrath was not unleashed against later attempts at it is that Nabokov died in 1977 - the year Johnston's version was first published. It is true that the authors of more recent translations of 'Onegin' benefited form access to Nabokov's literalistic rendering (which makes a very useful crib but cannot possibly be recommended to lay readers of poetry) and his painstakingly detailed commentary - but so did Arndt when he revised his translation in 1981.

Form-preserving translations inevitably involve what Nabokov derisively called "arty paraphrase", and a common argument against such translations goes along the lines of "I prefer to know what the poet meant". The problem with this position is that Pushkin meant to create a work of art based on harmonious interplay between the sense conveyed by the words and the music of iambic tetrameters arranged in exquisitely rhymed stanzas. Approximating this interplay in English is a formidable challenge, but it is the only way to get anywhere near the intention of Pushkin. If some readers would rather enjoy the most precise English equivalents of his words, preferably placed in the same order as in the original (where this order, and even the words themselves, were often chosen for the sake of the metre and rhyme that have vanished in the literal translation) - well, that is their choice. Arndt dismissed translations of this type as "sad ritual murder performed for the purposes of an ever more insatiable lexical necrophilia".

As many as eight form-preserving translations of 'Onegin' can be found on Amazon: see my list "Form-preserving translations of 'Eugene Onegin', 1881-2008". Having given a try to five of them, I think that it is only natural that different readers may prefer different versions. For what it is worth, Arndt's translation turned out to the only one that I wanted to continue reading after a few pages (I know much of the original by heart). His text flows almost effortlessly, his rhymes seldom feel forced, and he manages to put across some of the stylistic brilliance and sheer magic of Pushkin's writing. Arndt is also particularly good at translating passages that involve complex emotions or subtle humour, of which there are plenty in this book.

Some readers are attracted by the contemporary vocabulary and idiom of the translations of 'Onegin' made in the 21st century, and this is as good a reason as any to prefer one translation to another. However, bearing in mind that rhymed metrical verse is inevitably perceived as archaic by today's Anglophone readers, and that the language of the original feels somewhat old-fashioned to today's speakers of Russian, it is not at all clear whether rendering 'Onegin' (written by a contemporary of Byron) in modern parlance has much artistic credibility. The language of Arndt sounds more fitting to me.

Overall, my recommendation would be to read at least two translations of this outstanding work of literature and to choose Arndt's classical version as one of them.

In his famous sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer", Keats describes his excitement on discovering the works of Homer, comparing himself to an astronomer discovering a new planet or the explorer who first came across the Pacific Ocean. Lacking a classical education, however, Keats was unable to read Greek in the original, and therefore had to access Homer through the once-famous translation by the Elizabethan scholar George Chapman.

I had a similar experience when I recently read James E. Falen's translation of "Eugene Onegin". Although I studied some Russian at school, I never achieved anything like the fluency needed to read Russian literature in the original. I have read plenty of Russian prose in translation, from Lermontov to Solzhenitsyn, but had always avoided Pushkin until now, possibly through a fear that too many of the qualities of his verse would be lost in translation. It has become something of a commonplace to say of Pushkin that, although he is regarded by Russians as their supreme national poet, with a status comparable to that enjoyed by Shakespeare in Britain or Goethe in Germany, the greater difficulty of translating verse means that he has never quite achieved the same renown abroad as Russian prose writers such as Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky.

The story of "Eugene Onegin" is familiar to English-speakers, so much so that the hero's Christian name (Yevgeniy in the original) is normally given in an anglicised form, but this is probably due as much to Tchaikovsky's opera as to the novel. Onegin is an early example of the sort of character who has become known as the "superfluous man". Such men are generally young, intelligent and talented, but bored, cynical and world-weary. Although such characters have become particularly associated with Russian literature, Pushkin's main inspiration was British, Byron's "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage". He in turn was to inspire Lermontov's "A Hero of Our Time"; the younger writer was to acknowledge this inspiration by naming his hero Pechorin. (The Onega and the Pechora, from which the two characters' names are taken, are both rivers in northern Russia).

Characteristics commonly associated with "superfluous men" are an inability to form close friendships with other men or lasting relationships with women, and a tendency to indulge in risky or self-destructive behaviour. Both these aspects are present in the novel, shown by Eugene's rejection of Tatyana, the artless young woman who falls in love with him, and in the duel he fights with his former friend Lensky. (It is one of the eerie coincidences of literature that both Onegin and Pechorin fight duels and kill their opponents, whereas their creators Pushkin and Lermontov were both to fight duels and be killed).

Although the main characters are all youthful and the poem was written by a comparatively young man- Pushkin began it in his mid-twenties and completed it in his early thirties- an important theme is that of regret for the loss of youth, especially for the loss of youthful passion and idealism. He writes that

"All our finest aspirations
Our brightest dreams and inspirations
Have withered with each passing day
Like leaves dank autumn rots away",

and these words are intended to apply both to the poet himself and to the hero of his poem. Onegin was perhaps once as idealistic as Lensky or Tatyana, but he is now a man grown old, in spirit if not in body, before his time. Yet the idealism and ardour of youth can be as dangerous as the disillusioned cynicism of experience; the fatal duel is provoked as much by Lensky's recklessness and naivety as by Onegin's cold-hearted selfishness. Tatyana may be sincere and innocent, but is also impetuous and lacking in judgement; no woman who was anything else would have fallen so madly in love with an obvious cad like Onegin, or allowed herself to be so emotionally devastated by his rejection of her.

Pushkin called "Eugene Onegin" a "novel in verse", although if reduced to prose it would be closer in length to a novella. It is written in a verse-form of Pushkin's own invention, the "Onegin stanza" of fourteen lines with a complex rhyme-scheme and alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes. Apart from Vikram Seth who recently used it for his own verse novel "The Golden Gate", this verse-form is little used in English poetry, but Falen chooses to retain it as the vehicle for his translation, and uses it brilliantly.

Advocates of modernist poetry have argued that strict verse-forms act as an unnecessary restriction on the poet's ability to express himself, but here the precise opposite is true. What excited me so much about this translation is the way in which the same stanza form is used to suggest a number of quite different moods- at times the poem is playful and ironic, even satirical, at others lyrical, particularly in its depictions of the Russian countryside, and others longing and wistful, and at others serious or philosophical. "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, When a new planet swims into his ken".