The other translators who have put Pushkin's novel into English have chosen, unlike Nabokov, to honour in most respects the 'Onegin stanza' and to retain the original's metrical scheme and rhyme. Two of them in particular, Walter Arndt and Charles Johnston, have done so with some success and have demonstrated thereby that the task may be slightly less impossible than it seems. My own attempt to pursue the elusive Pushkin yet again has profited much by their example, following them in their virtues and avoiding, as far as possible, their defects. If the results presented here are no less provisional than their efforts or the efforts of others that have gone before, I have none the less greatly enjoyed my pursuit of Pushkin and have found the view, even from the lower altitudes, well worth the climb.
I, too, have elected, in my version, to preserve what I could of Pushkin's form, taking the Onegin stanza as one of the novel's most essential and characteristic features, the building-block with which the entire edifice is constructed. By retaining the stanza form that Pushkin uses as his poetic paragraph, the translator positions himself, in a sense, on the work's home ground and imposes upon himself a useful discipline for his journey. Furthermore, he is thereby constrained, as was the poet himself, to seek solutions without self-indulgence, to find variety within oneness, and to earn freedom within the bondage of the form. The very rigidity of the stanzaic structure can bring at times a fruitful tension to the words with which the form is made manifest, and the economy of expression it enforces upon the translator will sometimes reward him with an unexpected gift.
In working, over quite a few years, on several visions and revisions of this translation, I have found myself searching for an ever more natural and unforced flow of language, for a more fluid and straightforward syntax, a lighter and more readily comprehensible style; I have tried to avoid as much as possible
the sorts of inversions and verbal contortions that have marred in my view the earlier translationsall in an effort to capture what seemed to me the poem's spontaneous and unlaboured effect in Pushkin's Russian. I have also tried to adapt the rhythms of the poem to the rhythms of English speecha speech that in my rendition sounds somewhat more American than British in its accent and somewhat more contemporary than period in its idiom. Ultimately, I have attempted to provide the English-speaking reader of today with a more accessible version of one of the great works of the Russian literary imagination, one that would speak in a familiar, not-too-distant English voice and that would convey not only something of the novel's sense and shape, but some hints of its characteristic flavour as well: its verve and sparkle, its lyricism and wit, its succinctness and variety: the play of lights and shadows in an imperfect mirror.
A few words on the Onegin stanza. The main body of the novel consists in its final form (some stanzas having been discarded by Pushkin for a variety of reasons) of some 366 stanzas of a common design. The fourteen lines of this stanzaic form suggest, of course, the sonnet, but the rhyming pattern is unique (ababccddeffegg), as is the adherence to a fixed sequence of masculine and feminine rhymes (that is, rhymes in which the stresses fall on the final or the penultimate syllables, respectively): fmfmffmmfmmfmm. The metre, iambic tetrameter, though it may seem somewhat terse for a long narrative poem in English, is hardly in itself alien to our tradition. Composi- tionally, the stanzas are organized in a variety of ways: as a single unit, as octave and sestet, or as three quatrains and a couplet. The second quatrain may function as two couplets (ccdd), and the sestet as two linked tercets (eff egg). The three quatrains, it will be noted, employ in sequence the three possible patterns for a binary rhyme scheme: alternating (abab), balanced (ccdd), and enclosed (effe). Pushkin uses his sonnet-paragraph with great virtuosity and flexibility. The opening quatrain and the closing couplet are usually the
most clearly marked, while the middle sections are treated with great variety. The final masculine couplet, especially, tends to stand out as a tersely pointed and often ironic coda.
There are considerably more than 5,000 lines of verse in this work, and the sheer quantity of its rhyme, it must be admitted, sorely tests the translator's inventiveness. I am also well aware that rhyme today is somewhat less common in serious English verse than it used to be and that its pervasiveness here may seem uncongenial to the modern ear. I rely, therefore, on the reader's tolerance for traditions beyond the borders of current taste and on the hope that something archaic may have grown so unfamiliar as to offer, perhaps, the pleasure of novelty. On some of the Russian names in the text and on a few other words I have placed an accent mark on the syllable that bears the stress; in general, however, the iambic metre should be a sufficient guide to the pronunciation of unfamiliar words. The Russian text used for this translation is essentially that used by Nabokov, the so-called 'third' edition, the last to be published during Pushkin's lifetime.
Finally, let me express once again my indebtedness to the previous translators of Pushkin's poem. Vladimir Nabokov's work, in particular, was a constant challenge to strive for greater accuracy, and his extensive commentary on the novel was an endless source of both instruction and pleasure. I want also to express my gratitude to Oxford University Press for giving me, in this second edition of my translation, the opportunity to revise the text and to add to it the verse fragments on 'Onegin's Journey' that Pushkin appended to his novel. I should like also to repeat my thanks to Professor Lauren Leighton of the University of Illinois at Chicago for his considerable support and encouragement and to my colleague John Osborne for patiently reading all those early drafts and for urging me, when my energy waned, to continue with a restless ingenuity. My wife, Eve, has been a sharp but always partial critic. To all those, including those unnamed, who have helped to improve
this translation and to eliminate, at least in part, its lapses from sense and grace, many thanks.
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