by Alex Beam
How to explain the immortal allure of this impossible poem? Pushkin created his own metrical system, the “Onegin stanza,” to tell Eugene’s story, and it is strikingly beautiful in the original. The sonnets are unyielding in their iambic tetrameter rhythm, in their rhyme scheme—ababccddeffegg—and rigidly committed to a defined interplay of masculine and feminine rhymes—fmfmffmmmfmmfmm. (A masculine rhyme ends in one syllable; a feminine, or double rhyme, ends in two.) Here is the retired British diplomat Sir Charles Johnston precisely emulating the famous stanza in his 1977 translation:
Was this the Tanya he once scolded
In that forsaken, distant place
Where first our novel’s plot unfolded?
The one to whom, when face to face,
In such a burst of moral fire,
He’d lectured gravely on desire?
The girl whose letter he still kept—
In which a maiden heart had wept;
Where all was shown…all unprotected?
Was this that girl…or did he dream?
That little girl whose warm esteem
And humble lot he’d once rejected?…
And could she now have been so bold,
So unconcerned with him…so cold?
—Onegin 8.20
The verses have an astonishing levity in Russian, a language that can stack up heavily on the palate. It is almost impossible to resist the very bearable lightness of “this light name, Pushkin,” as the poet Alexander Blok called him. (Pukh means “down” or “fluff” in Russian.) Sinyavsky elaborated that “Lightness in relation to life was the foundation of Pushkin’s conception of the world, that feature of his character and biography. Lightness in verse became the condition of his creativity.”5
Pushkin and Onegin are often likened to Byron, whose work Pushkin knew and admired. I think Pushkin more closely resembles Alexander Pope, for his predilection for mischief (though Byron certainly competes in that category) and for his “light” satirical tone that belies its serious intent. Pope “lisp’d in numbers” from an early age, and Pushkin likewise. At age sixteen “I started to speak in rhyme,” he wrote in an early poem to one of his lyceum teachers. Onegin seems to be a very light product indeed.
“Eugene Onegin—like champagne / Its effervescence stirs my brain” is how the novelist Vikram Seth described the effect of reading the poem he reworked into The Golden Gate, a cascade of 690 gleaming Onegin stanzas that Gore Vidal called “the Great California Novel” when it was published in 1986.*4
Onegin is some of the most beautiful Russian poetry ever written. Its organization is chaotic. It is all very Russian.
Being Russian, it is not only beautiful and raggedly assembled, it is also mysterious. It is Pushkinesque, thrown together rather like he lived his life, artfully and on the fly. Eugene in many ways resembled Pushkin, certainly the pre-exile boulevardier who roamed the Nevsky in his fashionable, dark “Bolivar” hat. The Onegin manuscripts teem with small illustrations, mostly portraits of Pushkin’s friends and lovers, and the author even drew a famous sketch of himself and Eugene lounging on the Palace Embankment, across the Neva from the great symbol of czarist authority (and tyranny), the Peter and Paul Fortress.
Pushkin’s own sketch of himself and Onegin, lounging on the Neva embankment. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
It is impossible to avoid the feeling that Pushkin dwelled in his novel, and he was known to comment on its characters’ behaviors in odd moments. “Do you know that my Tatiana has rejected Onegin?” he wrote to a friend. “I never expected it of her.” Pushkin being Pushkin, he even wrote a vulgar epigram featuring a Tatiana “beset with stomach throes” (Nabokov’s translation) who wipes her ass with a newspaper that had incurred the poet’s wrath.
Most ominously, Pushkin replayed the minutiae of Eugene’s fateful chapter 6 duel with Lensky in his own life, eleven years after writing the famous scene. Just as in the novel, a Paris-made LePage pistol fired the fatal shot. Like Lensky, Pushkin perished for reasons that seem opaque at best; he called out a young French officer, Georges-Charles D’Anthès, who may or may not have been paying too much attention to the poet’s young wife.*5 Just thirty-seven years old, Pushkin was widely acknowledged to be Russia’s greatest poet. “The sun of our poetry has set!” read a short necrology in the Russian Invalid newspaper. “Every Russian heart knows the whole value of this irrevocable loss and every Russian heart will be lacerated.” The czar’s ministers saw the crowds swelling outside Pushkin’s home, and quickly moved his funeral from St. Isaac’s Cathedral to a small church. Fearing a political riot, the authorities insisted that Pushkin’s funeral bier be transported to the church at night, and forbade university professors and students from attending the poet’s last rites.
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SOME OFT-TOLD STORIES are surely true. In 1949 Vladimir Nabokov had begun teaching his famous lecture course on Russian literature to undergraduates at Cornell University. When citing passages from Nikolai Gogol or Leo Tolstoy, Nabokov habitually translated excerpts from the text himself. Nabokov liked to rail against the established translators of nineteenth-century Russian masterpieces like Constance Garnett or David Magarshack, but he wasn’t eager to supplant them. For one thing, it didn’t pay. (Nabokov signed a contract to translate Anna Karenina—sorry, Anna Karenin—into English, but never delivered a manuscript. He did devote huge amounts of time and energy to translating his own pre-1940 works from Russian into English.) He especially bemoaned the lack of even a serviceable Onegin in English. One can imagine him becoming tiresome on this subject, prompting Vera to utter the fateful words: “Why don’t you translate it yourself?”
Why not indeed? And so began a fourteen-year-long journey to produce what Nabokov occasionally called his greatest masterpiece, a book he felt sure would become a best-selling cornerstone of twentieth-century letters.
A few years into the Onegin project, during which he published three novels and another translation, while keeping up his teaching schedule through 1959, Nabokov developed an elaborate theory of how the poem should be rendered into English. Onegin could be best rendered in English as a “pony” or a “trot,” meaning as a literal translation, he argued, because Pushkin’s watchworks-precise meter and rhyme scheme could never read into the English language. But earlier, in 1944, when he and Wilson were scrambling to dream up publishing projects, Nabokov translated a few perfectly rendered, rhymed, and metered “Onegin stanzas” and sent them to his friend. Not surprisingly, Nabokov’s handiwork shines:
I see the surf, the storm-rack flying…
Oh, how I wanted to compete
With the tumultuous breakers dying
In adoration of her feet!
—Onegin 1.33
“The Onegin fragment is good,” Wilson responded, hurrying on to other matters. Then Nabokov sent yet another translated fragment, and Wilson gently tried to push him off from this bootless venture.*6 “Don’t you think shorter things are more in order?”6 Wilson wrote back. He pointed out that Onegin had already been translated, “though badly enough,” several times. But Nabokov had the bit between his teeth, and in 1948 pitched Wilson his book idea: “Why don’t we write together a scholarly prose translation of Evgenii Onegin with copious notes?” There is no record of a response.*7
Nabokov persevered. In a 1949 letter he talked about tossing off “a little book on Onegin” for the Oxford University Press, a “complete translation in prose with notes giving associations and other explanations for every line.”7 In just five years he had accomplished a great deal, and in 1955 published a provocative Partisan Review essay titled “Problems of Translation: Onegin in English.” Here he trotted out most of the points he would repeat a decade later, word for word, in the contumacious and self-assured introduction to his Onegin.
“It is impossible to translate Onegin in rhyme,” he wrote, but he did allow that a translation could try to preserve the iambic beat of the original, varying line lengths from iambic dimeter to i
ambic pentameter. “Readable” translations were rubbish: “A schoolboy’s boner is less of a mockery in regard to the ancient masterpiece than its commercial poetization.” Previous translators were idiots: “There are four English complete versions unfortunately available to college students.” Nabokov demanded that Onegin be translated into “absolute literal sense, with no emasculation and no padding,” and—nota bene—“with copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page.”
Nabokov working at his desk at Cornell. The folders of his Onegin draft loom in the foreground. (Photograph by Maclean Dameron, Cornell University Photo Sciences Dept., Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library)
“When my Onegin is ready,” he concluded, “it will either conform exactly to my vision or not appear at all.”
That same year Nabokov published a two-stanza poem—two Onegin stanzas, mind you—in The New Yorker, titled “On Translating Eugene Onegin.” The opening lines are famous:
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….
Elusive Pushkin! Persevering,
I still pick up Tatiana’s earring,
Still travel with your sullen rake.
I find another man’s mistake,
I analyze alliterations
That grace your feasts and haunt the great
Fourth stanza of your Canto Eight.
This is my task—a poet’s patience
And scholiastic passion blent:
Dove-dropping on your monument.8
The project grew and grew. In early 1953 Nabokov spent two months researching in Harvard’s Widener Library, and amassed three hundred pages of draft commentary. He predicted that the book would be six hundred pages long.9
By 1958, when he finished the draft he would submit for publication, his manuscript was 2,500 pages.10 When yesteryear’s futurist, Future Shock author Alvin Toffler, interviewed Nabokov at the Montreux Palace in 1964 for Playboy, Nabokov pointed to his Onegin work product “over there on that shelf.” There they were: three sixteen-inch-long shoeboxes, containing about five thousand annotated index cards.
* * *
*1 It was Nabokov‘s contention that only Russian female performers like the ballerina Anna Pavlova merited feminization, with the added a, of their family names. This came off as a silly quirk, certainly to his wife Vera, who signed her letters “Véra Nabokova.”
*2 Chapter 2 famously “slid down [was lost] on an ace,” a friend of Pushkin’s reported. Pushkin replied: “I did not lose Chapter Two to you, what I did was pay you my debt with its published copies.” Nabokov notes that “it is of psychological interest” that Pushkin cut two delightful stanzas about his passion for gambling from the final version of chapter 2. Separately, in 1826, Pushkin admitted to a friend, “Instead of writing Chapter Seven of Onegin, I go and lose Chapter Four at [cards]—which is not funny.”
*3 “In Russia, the censorship department arose before literature; its fateful seniority has always been in evidence.”—Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift
*4 Seth never read a word of Pushkin in Russian. He repeatedly said that it was reading Johnston’s meter-and-stress-faithful Onegin while killing time in a Palo Alto bookstore that inspired him to tackle The Golden Gate. The cognitive sciences professor Douglas Hofstadter, who translated Onegin in 1999, first discovered Pushkin by reading The Golden Gate.
*5 Nabokov spots another coincidence, if there can really be such a thing: Pushkin shoehorns his lover Zizi Wulf—he is making a joke about her un-wasp-like waist—into a banquet scene that takes place just two days before the fictional Lensky’s death. The real Zizi dined with Pushkin in St. Petersburg the night before his fatal duel.
*6 Nabokov composed these three stanzas as part of a submission to Doubleday, for a jointly written book on Russian literature, with his translations to be accompanied by Wilson’s commentary. That project never saw the light of day, although the authors eventually choked out separate books to placate the publisher.
Nabokov later translated one more Onegin-style stanza into rhymed, iambic English—one he wrote himself. The final paragraph of his 1938 Russian novel, The Gift, scanned as a perfect Onegin verse. When Nabokov himself translated the novel in 1963, he rendered this passage, quite beautifully, into a rhymed, perfectly metered Onegin stanza in English.
*7 There is no reference in this exchange to Wilson’s own attempt at translating Onegin, in a 1936 New Republic article, “In Honor of Pushkin.” After noting that “the poetry of Pushkin is particularly difficult to translate,” Wilson translated some famous stanzas about the coming of winter into serviceable English prose, albeit not serviceable enough for the Vladimir Nabokov who published his Onegin in 1964. Nabokov seems to have caught up with Wilson’s English Onegin when the piece appeared in one of Wilson’s many compendia, The Triple Thinkers: Twelve Essays on Literary Subjects, released in 1948. He credits Wilson as “the first to have adopted unrhymed iambics for rendering EO”—the very approach Nabokov eventually landed on. He then points out nineteen instances of mistranslation in Wilson’s three slender paragraphs. Wilson’s biographer Jeffrey Meyers noticed that Nabokov’s treatment of Wilson’s work hardened between his original 1964 edition and the revised 1975 book. In 1964 Wilson was guilty of “a few minor inexactitudes.” By 1975 he had committed “a number of inaccuracies.”
6
What Hath Nabokov Wrought?
The book’s path to publication was not smooth. Thanks to Lolita, Nabokov was a literary rock star, and publishers proved eager to sign up (almost) anything that rolled off the tip of his pen. Doubleday liked Nabokov, and vice versa, but the idea of publishing the four-volume, reduced-font, 1,895-page monster makes the editor Jason Epstein laugh fifty-plus years after the fact. “That crazy translation of Eugene Onegin? God no!” Epstein says. “No one would buy that! It’s the work of a madman. Nabokov said it couldn’t be done, and it couldn’t. It’s an impossible book, you can’t read it.” Nabokov’s colleagues at the Cornell University Press likewise wanted no part of this white elephant. Ultimately, it was Epstein who found a safe haven for Onegin, at the nonprofit Bollingen Foundation Press, headquartered in Washington, DC.
Bollingen and Nabokov’s Onegin would prove a fine fit. The philanthropist Paul Mellon’s wife Mary Conover Mellon created the Bollingen Foundation to memorialize the life’s work of the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. The first time Mary heard Jung speak, she remarked, “Though I don’t know what he means, this has something very much to do with me.” Bollingen was the name of the Swiss town where Jung had built a small house for himself, with his own hands. Mellon was a name synonymous with money. Paul’s father, Andrew, had been secretary of the treasury for more than a decade, and Paul donated to the public, among other things, Washington’s National Gallery of Art. Paul Mellon had spent a semester at St. John’s College, the Great Books mecca in Annapolis, Maryland, and developed a lifelong interest in the classical tradition and the liberal arts.
Bollingen was sui generis, often soliciting book projects from writers they admired, rather than relying on formal proposals. The editors were arch-mandarins, and distinguished themselves over the years by publishing not only Jung, but also the Buddhist scholar D. T. Suzuki, a famous translation of the I Ching, and perhaps most notably, Joseph Campbell’s books, including the best-selling Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell once remarked that “I don’t know if anybody would ever have heard of me if it hadn’t been for Bollingen.”1
Wallace Brockway, one of Bollingen’s top editors, was initially enthusiastic about landing Nabokov. He described the Onegin translation as “altogether admirable and we should lose no time in ‘signing him up’ as they say in the trade-book houses. Mr. Nabakov [sic], who is a crotchety enough fellow, offers his version in a rather fierce spirit, but—I would say—rightfully so.�
��2 Brockway changed his tune a few months later when he started leafing through the hundreds of pages of the “Commentary” that accompanied the translation: “I must say at once that it presents a central problem that may not be solved without some controversy,” Brockway wrote:
That is, it takes for granted a reader who is as familiar with French as with English. Mr. Nabokov has the point of view of an old-fashioned Russian of the better classes, one, that is to say, who quite normally spoke French to his equals and Russian to his servants….
The work is addressed not merely to the cultivated, but to those so cultivated that they can take an unkeyed reference in their stride. For example, speaking of the bowdlerized translation of Theocritus by one of Wordsworth’s sons, he says that what Wordsworth did to the text is far more immoral than what Comas did to Lacon—he refers here, but without keying it, to a pederastic situation in Theocritus so overt that even the most modern translator-editor of the text, A.S.F. Gow, puts the Greek Text into Latin.*1
Nabakov’s [sic] divagations are as errant as Balzac’s, quite as interesting, and often more amusing. Some of them verge on the irrelevant, because he is compulsively impatient of timidity. He goes overboard, but always in the spirit of a great critic.3
Editing Nabokov would not be Brockway’s problem. That honor redounded to William McGuire, a seasoned editor with many of the Jung publications to his credit. He would be aided by Bart Winer, the second copy editor Bollingen threw at the project, whom Nabokov came to like and admire, citing him by name in the introduction. Notwithstanding Brockway’s “animadversions”—a word that crops up often when Bollingen staffers talk about Onegin—the foundation signed a contract in March 1959. Nabokov promised to deliver five hundred thousand words on Onegin, with an elaborate “Commentary,” which Bollingen planned to publish in a multivolume edition priced at $18.50 ($150 today). The foundation noted that Nabokov’s most recent work, the novel Pale Fire, had sold thirteen thousand copies in its first year. They decided to print five thousand copies of Onegin. Nabokov received no advance, but a straight 10 percent royalty on all copies sold.
