PROBLEMS OF TRANSLATION
499
Pere Bougeant, jesuite")
the Onegin sestet is exactly represented by
the lines
Mais pourquoi donner au mystcre,
Pourquoi reprocher au hazaTd
De ce prompt et triste depart
La cause trop involontaire?
Oui, vous seriez encore
a
nous
Si vous etiez vous-meme
a
vous.
Theoretically speaking, it is not impossible that a complete
Onegin
stanza may be found embedded somewhere in the endless
"Epistles" of those periwigged bores, just as its sequence of rhymes
is found in LaFontaine's
Contes
(e.g.,
«Nicaise,"
48-61) and in Push–
kin's own freely-rhymed
Ruslan i Lyudmila,
composed in his youth
(see the last section of Canto Three, from
,(a otdalyonn'imi godami
to
skazal mne vazhno
C
hernomor).
In this Pushkinian pseudo-sonnet
the opening quatrain, with its brilliant alternate rhymes, and the clos–
ing couplet, with its epigrammatic click, are in greater evidence than
the intermediate parts, as if we were being shown first the pattern
on one side of an immobile sphere which would then start to revolve,
blurring the colors, and presently would come to a stop, revealing
clearly again a smaller pattern on its opposite side.
As already said, there are in
Onegin
more than 300 stanzas of
this kind. We have moreover fragments of two additional chapters
and numerous stanzas canceled by Pushkin, some of them sparkling
with more originality and beauty than any in the Cantos from which
he excluded them before publication. All this matter, as well as
Pushkin's own commentaries, the variants, epigraphs, dedications, and
so forth, must be of course translated too, in appendices and notes.
I I
Russian poetry is affected by the following six character–
istics of language and prosody :
1.
The number of rhymes, both masculine and feminine (i.e.,
single and double), is incomparably greater than in English and leads
to the cult of the rare and the rich.
As
in French, the
consonne d'ap–
pui
is obligatory in masculine rhymes and aesthetically valued in
feminine ones. This is far removed from the English rhyme, Echo's
