PROBLEMS OF TRANSLATION
509
whom he made pregnant and eventually bundled away to a second
demesne of
his,
in another province.
If
we now turn to Andre
Chenier, we find, in a fragment dated 1789 and published by La–
touche as
"Epitre VII,
a
de Pange aine"
(lines
5-8):
. . . II
a dans sa paisible et sainte solitude,
Du loisir, due sommeil, et les bois, et l'etude,
Le banquet des amis, et quelquefois, les soirs,
Le baiser jeune et frais d'une blanche aux yeux noirs.
None of the translators of Pushkin, English, German or French,.
have noticed what several Russian students of Pushkin discovered
independently (a discovery first published,
I
think, by Savchenko
-UElegiya Lenskogo i frantzuskaya elegiya,"
in
Pushkin v mirol)oy
literature,
note, p. 362, Leningrad 1926), that the two first lines
of our stanza XXXIX are a paraphrase, and the next two a meta–
phrase of Chenier's lines. Chenier's curious preoccupation with the
whiteness of a woman's skin (see for example
uElegie XXII)
and
Pushkin's vision of his own frail young mistress, fuse to form a mar–
velous mask, the disguise of a personal emotion; for it will be noted
that our author, who was generally rather careful about the identifi–
cation of his sources, nowhere reveals his direct borrowing here, as
if
by referring to the literary origin of these lines he might impinge
upon the mystery of
his
own romance.
English translators, who were completely unaware of all the
implications and niceties I have discussed in connection with
this
stanza, have had a good deal of trouble with it. Spalding stresses the
hygienic side of the event
the uncontaminated kiss
of a young dark-eyed country maid;
Miss Radin produces the dreadful:
a kisS! at times from some fair maiden
dark-eyed, with bright and youthful looks;
Miss Deutsch, apparently not realizing that Pushkin is alluding to'
Onegin's carnal relations with his serf girls, comes up with the in–
credibly coy:
and if a black-eyed girl permitted
sometimes a kiss as fresh as she;
