Eugene Onegin

by Alexander Pushkin

Pushkin’s long poem has had some seven English translations prior to this one (the more thorough Germans seem to have produced about twelve), and yet it has continued to be regarded by many as a classic instance of the untranslatable work. Vladimir Nabokov has argued that a literal rendering of Pushkin’s sentences is about the best that can be achieved or even honestly attempted; that any translation that retains the original’s metre and rhyme, since it cannot be faithful to the work’s exact meaning, will necessarily result in a mere paraphrase. In his own translation of the novel, which he proudly labelled a ‘pony’, he shunned, accordingly, both metre and rhyme and gave us a version at once marvellously accurate and rather peculiar, most of its poetry resident in the accompanying commentary rather than in the translation itself. Pushkin, one has to say, loses where Nabokov gains. And of course a ‘literal’ version is, in the end, no less unfaithful to its model than a rhymed and metred one: in place of a work whose austere and harmonious shape is an essential part of its effect, it gives us something ill-proportioned and flaccid, a kind of ‘formal paraphrase’ that seems bland and inert where the original is expressive and alive.