Alexander Pushkin - Eugene Onegin

The fifteenth anniversary of publication offers a plausible, if tardy, occasion for cleaning, renovation, and adding-on. In the present case these take two forms: revisions, major and minor, in the body of the verse, and the addition of some illuminating critical commentary by Pushkin scholars to the small original apparatus of introduction and annotation. Any significant expansion of the chapter notes beyond the modicum useful to nonspecialists was rendered supererogatory by the plethora of information, opinion, and, at times, bizarrerie on and off Onegin released in 1964 by V. V. Nabokov with his prodigious two-volume commentaryprobably his most enduring, certainly his most endearing, opus.

The present translation may be superabundantly complemented by the boundless learning of Mr. Nabokovwho did not compliment it, however, except before its publication. The emendations accumulated since 1963 affect perhaps one-third of the stanzas in some chapters, one-twentieth over the whole. They were prompted in a few instances by little quantum jumps in understanding of the poets intent or effects; more often by long-felt distress over syntactic or metric gadgetry, semantic evasions, lexical infelicities (not to mention some hardy misprints, like the inglorious one of the bear in Tatyanas dream who has been on her tailfor trailintermittently since 1963); sometimes, not often enough, by newly perceived shortcuts toward the simplicity and sparkle of the original. Eugene Onegin was my earliest major venture (after parts of Mickiewiczs Polish idyll, Pan Tadeusz) into verse translation in the proper sense of the term; which is, of course, Umdichtung, form-true remaking (from a single translator-poets familiar habitat in both the old and the new linguistic medium) of the poems seamless wholeits shape-content continuum. Twenty years and several larger enterprises later I sense that I am a better poet, certainly a more skillful and fastidious journeyman in the intricate matching and meshing crafts involved.

I hope it shows here and there in the revision. The inclusion of several essays by distinguished contemporary critics and scholars should add very significantly to the readers understanding of this unique work, its author, and the culture in which it is so deeply and permanently embedded. I want to express my warm thanks to Roman Jakobson, David Richards, Thomas Shaw, and Sona Hoisington for their gracious willingness to release their work for the present purpose; and to the editor and publishers of Canadian-American Slavic Studies, Charles Schlacks and Arizona State University; Messrs. Mouton, publishers of Roman Jakobsons Marginal Notes on Eugene Onegin in Pushkin and His Sculptural Myth; and Messrs. Willem A. J. J.

Richards and C. R. S. Cockrell, for granting their kind permission to reprint all or part of the above pieces. W ALTER A RNDT Hanover, New Hampshire1978