506
PARTISAN REVIEW
epithets of French poetry, and had he acted accordingly.
As
it is, Du–
pont's prose version
(1847),
while crawling with errors of a textual
nature,
is
more idiomatic.
There are four English complete versions unfortunately avail–
able to college students:
Eugene Oneguine,
translated by Lieut.-Col.
Spalding (Macmillan, London
1881);
Eugene Onegin,
translated
by Babette Deutsch in
The Works of Alexander Pushkin,
selected
and edited by Abraham Yannolinski (Random House, New York
1936); Evgeny Onegin,
translated by: Oliver Elton
(The Slavonic
Revue,
London, Jan.
1936
to Jan.
1938,
and The Pushkin Press,
London
1937);
Eugene Onegin,
translated by Dorothea Prall Radin
and George Z. Patrick (Univ. of California Press, Berkeley
1937).
All four are in meter and rhyme; all are the result of earnest
effort and of an incredible amount of mental labor; all contain here
and there little gems of ingenuity; and
all
are grotesque travesties of
their model, rendered in dreadful verse, teeming with mistranslations.
The least offender
is
the bluff, matter-of-fact Colonel; the worst
is
Professor Elton, who combines a kind of irresponsible verbal felicity
with the most exuberant vulgarity and the funniest howlers.
One of the main troubles with would-be translators is their ig–
norance. Only by sheer unacquaintance with Russian life in the
'twenties of the last century can one explain, for instance, their
persistently translating
derevnya
by "village" instead of "country–
seat," and
skakal'
by "to gallop" instead of "to drive." Anyone who
wishes to attempt a translation 'Of Onegin should acquire exact in–
formation in regard to a number of relevant subjects, such as the
Fables of Kn1ov, Byron's works, French poets of the eighteenth cen–
tury, Rousseau's
La Nouvelle Heloise,
Pushkin's biography, banking
games, Russian songs related to divination, Russian military ranks
of the time as compared to Western European and American ones,
the difference between cranberry and lingenberry, the rules of the
English pistol duel as used in Russia, and the Russian language.
VI
To illustrate some of the special subtleties that Pushkin's
translators should be aware of, I propose to analyze the opening
quatrain of stanza XXXIX in Chapter Four, which describes On-
