Great Performance

EUGENE ONEGIN by Alexander Pushkin. Translated from the Russian with a commentary by Vladimir Nabokov. 4 vols. 1,850 pages. Pantheon. $18.50.

Educated Russians of the pre-Communist era could be expected to know long passages of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin by heart. The romantic (and mock-romantic) novel in verse about Onegin, the bored fop, Lenski, the pup-poet he kills in a duel, and Tatiana, the good girl who grows up, was the first master piece of the modern Russian language. But until now an American who did not read Russian could only nod politely when told that the poem was a work of genius, and wonder, after looking at the translations available, whether a fondness for Onegin were not merely one more Tartar mania.

It has taken the formidable Vladimir Nabokov, scholar, poet, literary puzzlist and possessor of the most elegant 19th century English prose style still at large, to present enough of the poem to the nonreader of Russian so that the rest is guessable.

A reader who has known Onegin (pronounced Oh-nyay-gin, with a hard g) only as a Tchaikovsky opera finds to his surprise that Pushkin himself is one of the novel's main characters. He bustles through its pages like a genial host, seeing to it that each reader has a glass of champagne and has been properly introduced to the characters. His chatter — ironic remarks about the shortcomings of his friend Onegin, or an elaborate digression about the feet of pretty women he has known — has both awkwardness and charm. It also has an important literary purpose, in that it allows Pushkin to maintain the balance between involvement and detachment and participation and comment that his lightly ironic tone requires. Thus when the melodramatic plot has largely unwound (Onegin has rebuffed the lovestruck Tatiana and out of contrariness flirted with Olga, her sister and Lenski's fiancee; Lenski has foolishly challenged Onegin to a duel and has been shot for his trouble), Pushkin is able to brighten the mood by keeping himself between the characters and the reader. Ah well, yes, it is a great pity, his attitude suggests when the reader expresses sympathy, but then that is what happens to Lenskis.

Feudist of Caliber. Other English translations exist. The trouble with these, explains Nabokov, a literary feudist of Dr. Johnson's caliber, is that they are "unfortunately available to students." Another trouble is that they are rhymed. Brilliantly modulated rhyme is one of the high delights of the poem, but Nabokov argues heatedly that it is not possible to rhyme a translation and remain true with any exactitude to the meaning of the original. The English word that is needed for sense will not, except by happenstance, have the structure and ending that is needed for rhyme. Consequently the rhyming translator is led into paraphrase and thus, Nabokov argues—taking an extreme view in a dispute that will never be satisfactorily settled—into blurred sense and fudged detail.

After apologizing for the translations of others, Nabokov uncharacteristically apologizes for his own, in a rhymed, 14-line stanza that imitates the form invented by Pushkin for Onegin:

What is translation? On a platter

A poet's pale and glaring head,

A parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter

And profanation of the dead.