Eugene Onegin

Eugene Onegin (Yevgeny Onegin, ??????? ??????) is a novel in verse written by Aleksandr Pushkin. It is one of the classics of Russian literature and its hero served as the model for a number of Russian literary heroes. It was published in serial form between 1823 and 1831. The first complete edition was published in 1833, and the edition the current accepted version is based on was published in 1837.

Translations

There are a number of translations of the work into English of which the following are just a few.

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Walter W. Arndt's 1963 translation (ISBN 0875011063) was written keeping to the strict rhyme scheme of the Onegin Stanza and won the Bollingen Prize for translation. It is still considered as one of the best translations.

Related Topics:
Walter W. Arndt - 1963 - Bollingen Prize for translation

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Vladimir Nabokov severely criticised Arndt's translation, as he had criticised many previous (and later) translations. Nabokov's main criticism of Arndt's and other translations is that they sacrificed literalness and exactness for the sake of the prettiness of melody and rhyme and in 1964 he published his own scrupulously exact translation in four volumes. The first volume contains an introduction by Nabokov and the text of the translation. The Introduction discusses the structure of the novel, the Onegin stanza in which it is written and Pushkin's opinion of Onegin (using Pushkin's letters to his friends); and gives a detailed account of both the time over which Pushkin wrote Onegin and the various forms any part of it appeared in publication before Pushkin's death (after which there is a huge proliferation of the number of different editions). The second and third volume consists of very detailed and rigorous notes to the text. The fourth volume contains a facsimile of the 1837 edition. The discussion of the Onegin stanza contains the poem On Translating Eugene Onegin, which first appeared in print in The New Yorker on January 8, 1955, and is written in two Onegin stanzas. The poem is reproduced there both so the reader of his translation would have some experience of this unique form, and also to act as a further defence of his decision to write his translation in prose.

Related Topics:
Vladimir Nabokov - 1964 - The New Yorker - January 8 - 1955

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Nabakov's previously close friend Edmund Wilson reviewed Nabokov's translationhttp://www.nybooks.com/articles/12829 in the New York Review of Books, which sparked an exchange of letters there and an enduring falling-out between them.

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While many despair at the loss of what is at first most appealing in Pushkin's novel, Nabokov's translation is essential reading for anyone who wishes to study Onegin at a high level without learning Russian. Also a number of later translations which do attempt to preserve melody and rhyme and been helped by Nabokov's literal translation.

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John Bayley has described Nabokov's commentary as by far the most erudite as well as the most fascinating commentary in English on Pushkin's poem and the commentary as being as scrupulously accurate, in terms of grammar, sense and phrasing, as it is idiosyncratic and Nabokovian in its vocabulary. This 'Nabokovian vocabulary', which will require most readers to routinely reach for the dictionary, is considered to be a failing, as it is far from a recognisable or idiomatic English to most native speakers.

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In 1977 Charles Johnston published another translationhttp://lib.ru/LITRA/PUSHKIN/ENGLISH/onegin_j.txt trying to preserve the Onegin stanza, which is generally considered to surpass Arndt's. Johnston's translation is influenced by Nabokov. Vikram Seth's novel The Golden Gate was inspired by this translation.

Related Topics:
Charles Johnston - Vikram Seth - The Golden Gate

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James E. Falen (the professor of Russian at the University of Tennessee) published a translation in 1998 which is also influenced by Nabokov's translation.

Related Topics:
James E. Falen - University of Tennessee - 1998

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Douglas Hofstadter published a translation in 1999, again preserving the Onegin stanzas.

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Tom Beck 2004, preserving the Onegin stanzas ISBN 1-9035-1728-1

Related Topics:
Tom Beck - 2004

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