PROBLEMS OF TRANSLATION
503
same writers and the same
Cours de Litterature
that formed Lamar–
tine and Stendhal. This manual was the
"Lycee ou Cours de Littera–
ture, ancienne et moderne"
by Jean Frant;ois Laharpe, in sixteen
volumes, 1799-1805. To the end of his days, Pushkin's favorite au–
thors were Boileau, Bossuet, Corneille, Fenelon, Lafontaine, Moliere,
Pascal, Racine, and Voltaire. In relation to
his
contemporaries, he
found Lamartine melodious but monotonous, Hugo gifted but on the
whole second-rate; he welcomed the lascivious verse of young Musset,
and rightly despised Beranger. In
Onegin
one finds echoes not only
of Voltaire's
«
Le M ondain"
(various passages in Chapter One) or
Millevoye's
Elegies
(especially in passages related to Lenski), but
also of Parny's
Poesies Erotiques,
Gresset's
Vert-vert,
Chenier's mel–
ancholy melodies and of a host of
petits poetes
tran~ais,
such as Baif,
Gentil Bernard, Bernis, Bertin, Chaulieu, Colardeau, Delavigne, De–
liile, Desbordes-Valmore, Desportes, Dorat, Ducis, Gilbert, Lattaig–
nant, Lebrun, Le Brun, Legouve, Lemierre, Leonard, MalfiIatre,
Piron, Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, and others.
As to German and English, he hardly had any. In 1821, trans–
lating Byron into gentleman's French for his own private use, he
renders "the wave that rolls below the Athenian's grave" (beginning
of the
Giaour)
as
ace tlot qui roule sur la greve d'Athene."
He read
Shakespeare in Guizot's and Amedee Pichot's revision of Letourneur's
edition (Paris, 1821) and Byron in Pichot's and Eusebe de Salle's
versions (Paris, 1819-21). Byron's command of the cliche was singu–
larly dear to Russian poets as echoing the minor and major French
poetry on which they had been brought up.
It would have been a flat and dry business indeed,
if
the verbal
texture of
Onegin
were reduced to these patterns in faded silks. But
a miracle occurred. When, more than a hundred and fifty years ago,
the Russian literary language underwent the prodigious impact of
French, the Russian poets made certain inspired selections and
matched the old and the new in certain enchantingly individual ways.
French stock epithets, in their Russian metamorphosis, breathe and
bloom anew, so delicately does Pushkin manipulate them as he dis–
poses them at strategic points of his meaningful harmonies. Inci–
dentally, this does not lighten our task.
