false 5 11 false false Fri Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 1988 Fri Nov 21 05:06:53 -0800 2008 Fri Jul 03 03:42:44 -0700 2009 5
"To make a start more swift than weighty
Hail Muse. Dear Reader, once upon
A time, say, circa 1980,
There lived a man. His name was John..."

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So I was telling Bram yesterday that, as far as I was concerned, the real translation of Eugene Onegin into English was The Golden Gate. It was just a theory I made up on the spur of the moment; I know The Golden Gate very well, I read Pushkin once, and it was clear there were some commonalities. I love The Golden Gate, and translations of Pushkin have always left me cold, particularly the Nabokov one.

This afternoon, I was standing in the line at Cambridge train station, when I noticed that the person behind me was a friend who's a Professor of Russian Literature. I said I was sure she had an opinion on Nabokov's translation of Pushkin. She wasn't that keen on it; she said it was incredibly accurate, and the commentary was "brilliant", but it still left her feeling disappointed. Then, without any prompting whatsoever from me, she went on to recommend reading Vikram Seth's book, which she said was virtually a transposition to American English and 80s California. Same number of chapters, close correspondences between people and motifs, many explicit references.

Well! It's the closest I've ever got to the scene in Annie Hall, where Woody Allen suddenly produces Marshall McLuhan to support his argument. What are the odds against that happening?
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