I love Pushkin.
Who doesn’t?
The Russians consider him their best writer.
After a a few days of barely looking up from Pushkin’s Collected Stories (and you must read “The Queen of Spades,” a ghost story about a gambling grandmother), I decided to reread Eugene Onegin.
I first read Pushkin’s lively novel in verse in college, as did my husband. We lost our identical copies years ago, and have no idea what translation it was. And then two years ago I got a hankering to reread it. I picked up a new Penguin and enjoyed Stanley Mitchell’s elegant, charming translation of Eugene Onegin.
So why did I need Anthony Briggs’ new translation, Yevgeny Onegin? Because Nicholas Lezard at The Guardian listed it as one of his favorite books of the year.
Although Briggs’ and Mitchell’s approaches to verse and word choice are different, both translations are readable. I wrote here in January 2015 about Mitchell’s translation:
In this brilliant novel in verse, Pushkin tells the story of Eugene Onegin, a rakish Byronic hero who, bored by carousing, wine, women, song, writing, and even books, moves from St. Petersburg to the country after inheriting an estate. He befriends a young poet, Lensky, to whom he is very devoted. And yet he thoughtlessly wrecks their friendship by flirting at a dance with Olga, Lensky’s fiancée. The result is a duel with Lensky. (Eugene doesn’t want it, and yet somehow he doesn’t say no.) And the whole thing is complicated by Eugene”s rejection of Olga’s sister, Tataina, who writes a love letter to him.
The narrator’s voice is almost always ironic, and the poem mixes lyricism with realism. Olga soon forgets Lensky and marries someone else. Tatiana visits Euegene’s deserted house and falls in love with his library. Eugene only falls in love with Tatiana years later, after it is too late.
Briggs’ translation is intelligent, but less elegant than Mitchell’s. That is not, however, why I am giving it away to a lucky reader. (Leave a comment if you’d like it.) It’s because I DON’T LIKE THE DESIGN. The Pushkin Press book is small, pretty, and chic, but has smaller print than the Penguin and is somehow less comfortable to hold. I had this same problem with the Dorothy Project’s chic edition of Barbara Comyns’ Who Was Dead and Who Was Changed, another little square book.
What I like most about the Briggs edition is the scholarly introduction, which explains the history of Pushkin’s invention of the Russian literary language and his prosody, inspired by Shakespeare.
Briggs writes,
The writer’s greatest achievement, apart from the literary quality of his work as a whole, in which the disciplines of classicism mesh with new freedoms released in the age of Romanticism, is nothing less than to have reformed the national language. This bold claim is no exaggeration. As he grew up, the young Pushkin was presented with at least three different linguistic forces existing as separate entities in his large country . Posh people spoke French, ignoring or despising ordinary Russian, though Pushkin heard a good deal of this tongue from the local lads and from his dear old nanny…(who makes an endearing guest appearance as Tatiana’s nurse in the third chapter of Yevgeny Onegin). In addition, he was continually subjected in church and at school to the rich sonorities of Old Church Slavonic. By some miracle, almost without thinking about it, he created modern Russian simply by using it, choosing at will between elegant Gallicisms, vernacular Russian and his nation’s equivalent of the King James Bible and Book of Common Prayer, with a sensitivity to sound, style and meeting that gives him an elevated place in the annals of linguistic reform.
Long ago, the beloved professor of my Russian lit in translation class examined the themes of maturity and metamorphosis in Eugene Onegin. He also lectured on the relationship between the narrator of Eugene Onegin and the reader, the narrator and Eugene, and the narrator and the work of literature.
If only I had taken better notes!
WHY I WISH I COULD LEARN RUSSIAN.
Why do Russian translations read so well? I do wish I could learn Russian. Translation (literally a “carrying across,” from the Latin transfero) is a precarious art: it captures sense but not sound, and only crudely suggests word arrangement, figures of speech and meter.
For years I devoted myself to classics and read little in translation. Why? Snobbishness and foolishness. One of my best and most snobbish classics professors (and “classics professor” implies excellence and snobbery) used to tell us, ” You can’t do serious work in translation.” I understand what he means–Mary McCarthy in The Groves of Academe also laughs at a student who writes her thesis on Broch’s The Death of Virgil, without being able to read Virgil –but where can we all find the time to be linguists? I was committed in grad school to eight to ten hours a day of ancient languages, studying for comps, and teaching elementary Latin and a Virgil’s Aeneid independent study. Learn Russian? Forget it!
Fewer people in the U.S. have opportunities to study foreign languages today. The culture is now very business-oriented, and many colleges and universities are slashing humanities courses. The state universities in the area are hanging on by a thread to their language departments. I do not expect this to get better under Trump’s rule.
Where I live? All language departments eliminated at the local “private” university!
Hey Kat, with Trump in the White House, it might be the time for you to finally study Russian.
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Yes, now that we’re about to live in the United States of Exxon!
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I wasted my college years by not learning Greek.
I would love the Pushkin, but only in a larger print. With my aging eyes, I am beginning to understand the appeal of large print editions.
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Oh, I love Greek! If only there were time for us all to study everything we’d like to know. Yes, the print size issue is critical, and that certainly affects my assessment.
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I *love* Russians as you know (!) and I so wish I’d learned the language younger. Alas, I think I’m past the age of being able to learn it, particularly one with a different alphabet. Ah well – thank goodness for translators…
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Yes, thank goodness! How could we possibly fit in all the languages we don’t know?
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I spent 4 years studying Russian and I don’t regret a moment of it. It remained true, however, that I still had to keep translating in my head and that my Russian was far from seamless. Learning the alphabet is easier than you might think as is learning how it “sounds”.
Maybe you can arrange for a tutor? Perhaps there is a graduate student’s partner who knows Russian and is willing to work with you. With your classical background, the building blocks of the language will be easy to grasp.
I doubt that anyone can become truly fluent after a certain point, but you can certainly learn enough to feel that you have a very good handle on the language.
I always enjoy reading your blog.
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Oh, how wonderful to have studied Russian! Yes, the alphabet might be related to the Greek, yes? It takes so many years to learn a language. A tutor might be an option: at least I could learn a bit so I could see how the language is arranged!
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I do encourage you. Your background in other languages will help enormously and once you can read the alphabet, you’ll be able to pick up words that are borrowed from English. You can learn how to read, write, and speak quite a bit “po-russki” (pronounded: parusskee). Some examples: the English H is the Russian “N”; the English “B” is the Russian “V”; the English “R” looks like “P” in Russian. If you wanted to say “Metro” in Russian, it would look like METPO but be pronounded “Metro”.
Best wishes!
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Thank you!
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Great post! I love Eugene Onegin, and last year I was lucky enough to see the opera in Arizona. My favorite Onegin is Dmitry Khvorostovsky’s. Here’s a little clip. I hope you like it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qa_13xMhjkg
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I’d love to see the opera.
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Love Mitchell, but Falen is even better. I ran a Twitter account that tweeted all of Onegin, alternating between four different editions. Great to meet a fellow fan
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One of these days I’ll get to the Falen. Great idea with Twitter!
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