Yevgeny Onegin Read Online

There are masses of these in English and in Russian. The problem arises with “feminine” rhymes, in which a stressed syllable is followed by an unstressed one, as in “token/spoken” or “level/bedevil”. Russian can form pleasing rhymes like this with ease; English cannot. In English there are so few feminine rhymes available that they strike us as boring. When you hear the word “languish”, isn’t it all too easy to guess what its rhyme will be? There is no other rhyme than “anguish”. “Feature” belongs only to “creature”, “habit” to “rabbit” and “sentence” to “repentance”. True, you can make up plenty of feminine rhymes by using common noun endings such as those ending in “-tion”, but these tend to be both obvious and tedious. Verbal rhymes are easily formed but utterly boring, especially participles like “hoping/moping” or “related/dated”. Almost all the available feminine rhymes in English are unusable because of their wearisome predictability, which is why our poets avoid them (unless you are a humorist like W.S. Gilbert).

Pushkin uses feminine rhymes throughout Yevgeny Onegin on a regular, alternating basis. This can be demonstrated best by giving feminine rhymes a capital letter and using lower case for masculine ones. The stanza which we have described actually rhymes like this: AbAb, CCdd, EffE, gg. Six of the endings are feminine (two syllables) and the other eight are masculine (one syllable). Here are the rhymes used for the opening stanza of the novel in one of the better English translations (with the feminine rhymes picked out):

If you look closely at, say, the rhymed dedication to this novel and its first stanza you will discover that every single existing translation employs more than one rhyme that can only be described as weak by being obvious, hackneyed, verbal or ending in “-tion”.

No one is going to notice anything wrong with the choice of these rhymes taken individually, but really they are far from ideal. The first pair belongs to that tedious group of words ending in “-tion”, the second pair are so obvious as to be virtually inevitable, and the third pair depend upon another tedious termination in “-ing”. You will not find many lazy rhyming pairs like these in the works of our major poets. And, although they float past unnoticed in any particular stanza, you can imagine the soporific effect of their use on a regular basis. To take a particularly unfortunate example, one translator uses the following six feminine rhymes in one stanza: reflection/complexion, fascination/condemnation, conversation/disputation; elsewhere he allows this sequence covering three successive stanzas: waiting/abating, agreed with/speed with, unsuspecting/inspecting, pretension/condescension, arising/apprising, rolling/strolling—all of them rather tedious (except for the splendidly surprising “agreed with/speed with”). He is not alone. Here are the feminine rhymes from one stanza in another version: inscribing/gibing, imbibing/transcribing, sobbing/throbbing, with quacking/a-lacking quick to follow in the next verse. Similarly, one of the very best translations allows a succession of verbal rhymes as long as this: quicken/thicken, quivers/shivers, playing/saying, pleading/reading, presented/invented. In at least two versions you will find a stanza using nothing but present participles for all of its six feminine rhymes: descending/wending, flaring/faring, commanding/standing, and grieving/receiving, keeping/sleeping, waiting/debating. Hardly what you would encounter in Milton or Wordsworth. (Incidentally, my German translation of this work demonstrates this tendency even more effectively. At the start of the fourth chapter, for example, the first twenty-one stanzas begin in a discouraging way. Pushkin has omitted the first six stanzas; stanza 7 begins with the feminine rhyme stehen/gehen, stanza 8 with verstellen/darzustellen, and so it goes on down to stanza 26 with vorzulesen/Menschenwesen and stanza 27 with reiten/Seiten. Only one stanza (10) fails to end in an “-n”. Of the others only 15 and 19 fail to end in “-en”. All the others—that is, eighteen out of twenty-one stanzas—have the same two letters as an ending for the opening feminine rhyme. Does everything in German have to end in an “-n”? The tedium experienced when reading pages treated in this way must stand as a stark warning to any new anglophone translator tempted in this direction.)

Such examples in our language could easily be multiplied, but we have seen enough to demonstrate one of the trickiest problems of English translation: the besetting danger of verbal rhymes and other hackneyed pairings.