The morning drum has sounded, telling people to get up and start the day. They have responded as they always do. Out they all come, a dealer, a hawker with his tray, a cabman, a delightful girl from the Okhta district with her milkmaid’s jug, and a fussy German baker busy at his little window, while blue smoke rises in a fine line, showing the stillness of the early day. This a delicious little scene, relevant to the story because its charm is lost on the main character, which tells us much about him, and consisting only of the sights and sounds (and smells from the bakery?) of everyday life. Nothing could be more typical of Pushkin’s manner. You will find another such example in the second stanza of Chapter Five, where another winter morning is brought to life first by a peasant sledging cheerfully through fresh snow, then by a gaudily dressed driver deriving even greater pleasure from hurtling past in a covered sleigh. But happiest of all is a little boy who has made his own form of transport by sitting his little dog up on his sledge while he acts as the driver and mum scolds him through the window. All three are revelling in the natural winter scene, and the little boy would fit straight into Pieter Bruegel’s realistic painting of children’s games that dates back to 1560, were it the right time of year. These modest, anonymous representatives of our species have no obvious claim to intrude upon the pages of a cultural masterpiece, but they add realism and atmosphere, and once you think of them there is no good reason to exclude them. Nothing could be nearer to Shakespeare or more remote from French classicism; none of these people comes near to passing Voltaire’s test of nobility and weighty relevance. Alexander Pushkin’s spontaneous introduction of the common touch into his country’s language and literature is the best thing about him, a stamp of instinctive genius and his greatest claim to fame.

The Translator’s Burden

The new interpreter starts out with a strong admiration for Pushkin and his finest achievement, mixed with deep respect for all the amateur versifiers who have already toiled lovingly to transmit some inkling of it into another language. This is the double burden to be borne by any new translator, together with the certain knowledge that the task is literally impossible.

One can only hope that the thrilling energy of a Pushkin poem can be released in sufficient quantities for some of it to carry across to the non-Russian mind. This is not quite as hopelessly optimistic as it may seem. Russian and English are closer to each other (with their shared strong word stress, huge vocabulary and wide range of acoustic expressiveness) than, for example, French and English. More specifically, Shakespeare, as we have seen, was ten times dearer to Pushkin than any confection of Racine, Corneille and Molière, and Byron’s irreverent appeal was massively greater than that of Lamartine. Thus there is a small chance of making an English translation sound something rather like the original, whereas a French version of Pushkin is unimaginable. (Is there such a thing? Even the transliteration of the poet’s name tells us something: the English “Púshkin”, stressed on the first syllable, looks and sounds quite close to the original whereas the (stressless) French “Pouchkine” has an alien quality, nothing like the Russian.) Armed with this small advantage, we can advance.

When translating a long prose work (as I well know from long experience with War and Peace) it is best to keep well away from earlier translations until you are well into the project. This will avoid all possibility of borrowing or imitation, conscious or otherwise. With Yevgeny Onegin, however, the opposite applies. It is essential to know and judge how previous attempts have tackled the various technical difficulties, such as the English spelling of Russian names, the sonnet-like stanza with its original and slightly complicated rhyme scheme involving many two-syllable rhymes, the variations in language register, the decision to modernize the English or attempt to keep it sounding slightly archaic and self-consciously poetic, and so on. There is a surprisingly wide range of solutions to these problems, and they all need careful consideration.

This is not the place to comb through the existing translations one by one, making close comparisons. That exercise is best left to postgraduate students with time to spare. Besides, it would be invidious to dwell on supposed examples of bad practice or mistaken judgements; the purpose of examining earlier versions is not to revel in triumphalist “improvements” but rather to avoid any dangerous pitfalls and improve the general quality of decision-making. Still, we must report briefly on what we have found in looking at all of the translations listed below.

What’s in a Russian Name?

First, the titular Russian name: Yevgény Onégin, which has not been rendered in this way by any other translator in English. The general preference is for “Eugene Onegin”, though you will also find the forename written as Evgeny. We are going for a straight transliteration of the original rather than the obvious and popular translation into a near English equivalent. One problem with “Eugene” is that, while the name has been widely used in Ireland and has transferred itself to America by emigration, the rest of the anglophone world is less comfortable with it. It does not sound like something central to English culture, as the Russian name is in Pushkin’s world. The first-syllable stress (Eugene) is also hard to manage, and it will sound odd if it is used to rhyme with “seen” or “spleen”. But the most important consideration is simply that the transliterated form preserves a delightful acoustic effect of the original: the fact that these two words (six syllables employing thirteen letters in either language) form a little lyric on their own:

Yevgény

Onégin.

The pleasant euphony of this small phrase is not a thing to be lost.