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.

The parasites you were so hard on

Are pardoned if I have your pardon,

O Pushkin, for my stratagem.

I traveled down your secret stem

And reached the root, and fed upon it;

Then, in a language newly learned

I grew another stalk and turned

Your stanza, patterned on a sonnet,

Into my honest roadside prose--

All thorn, but cousin to your rose.

Actually, it is something between prose and poetry that Nabokov has used--he has retained Pushkin's iambic tetrameter--and the result is a recognizable and respectable cousinship. To a Russian raised on the original poem, Nabokov's version naturally lacks the music, but retains much of the rhythm, and at least does not (as do the often jingly previous translations) mock Pushkin's music by the clumsiness of its imitation. The sense is as nearly exact as translation permits.

Horned or Cornute. Nabokov's own enormous word skill gives the translation felicity. But his very range of language allows him to choose words which, although exact in meaning, do not give the flavor of the original, generally because they are too highflown or arcane. The simple Russian word for "horned" (Ch. 6, XXXIX) becomes "cornute," which means horned but is not a simple English word. Simple words for "sweetness" and "youth" become "dulcitude" and "juventude" in English (Nabokov excuses himself somewhat abashedly by pointing out that the sense of the couplet--a sneer at moon-June versifying--requires that in this case the words rhyme).

But a reviewer must look hard for lapses. Notably, there is happily no feeling that the translator, who may be the greatest living performer--not necessarily writer--in English, is giving a performance.

It must be said that this rare suppression of the Nabokov literary personality is limited to the translation itself, and that the translation occupies only part of one volume of a four-volume work. Most of the remainder is a vast, outrageous, scholarly, funny, instructive and wholly characteristic mass of notes, offering 1) an exhaustive, line-by-line commentary on the text, variants of the text, and the difficulties of translation; 2) an exhaustive, line-by-line digression from this commentary, of which an elegant three-page defense of pedantry is typical; 3) a complete course in Russian and English prosody; 4) a learned if somewhat irritable gloss on 19th century literature; 5) a great deal of biographical information about Pushkin, which would be more helpful if it were collected in one chunk, not squirreled about the entire work; and 6) repeated masterly demonstrations of the art of literary insult. Dostoevsky, for instance, is described as "a much overrated, sentimental, and Gothic novelist of the time."

Occasionally (as when Nabokov solemnly offers as a talisman the lines that happen to fall at the exact center of the work), the notes are extreme enough to be worthy of Professor Kinbote, the demented footnoter of Nabokov's own Pale Fire.

Scholar's Craft. But such scholarly capering should not obscure the worth of Nabokov's commentary. The translation can be enjoyed but not really understood without it. And Nabokov, who learned his craft during years of professing at Wellesley and Cornell, is not merely a translator; he is also a truly remarkable teacher. He keeps the students awake.

Doubtless Nabokov will not win the war against paraphrased translation, which is his main concern. Perhaps it should not be won--not all paraphrases are profanations--but certainly it should be fought. But translators should be reminded that uprooting a masterpiece is not a job to be undertaken lightly ("Poetry is what is lost in translation," Robert Frost once observed); students, for their part, should be warned that a translation must never be read with complete trust.

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