Eugene Onegin

Translations

Translators of Eugene Onegin have all had to adopt a trade-off between precision and preservation of poetic imperatives. This particular challenge and the importance of Eugene Onegin in Russian literature have resulted in an impressive number of competing translations.

Into English

Arndt and Nabokov

Walter W. Arndt's 1963 translation (ISBN 0-87501-106-3) was written keeping to the strict rhyme scheme of the Onegin stanza and won the Bollingen Prize for translation. It is still considered one of the best translations.

Vladimir Nabokov severely criticised Arndt's translation, as he had criticised many previous (and later) translations. Nabokov's main criticism of Arndt's and other translations is that they sacrificed literalness and exactness for the sake of preserving the melody and rhyme.

Accordingly, in 1964 he published his own translation, consisting of four volumes, which conformed scrupulously to the sense while completely eschewing melody and rhyme. The first volume contains an introduction by Nabokov and the text of the translation. The Introduction discusses the structure of the novel, the Onegin stanza in which it is written, and Pushkin's opinion of Onegin (using Pushkin's letters to his friends); it likewise gives a detailed account of both the time over which Pushkin wrote Onegin and of the various forms in which the various parts of it appeared in publication before Pushkin's death (after which there is a huge proliferation of the number of different editions). The second and third volumes consist of very detailed and rigorous notes to the text. The fourth volume contains a facsimile of the 1837 edition. The discussion of the Onegin stanza in the first volume contains the poem On Translating "Eugene Onegin", which first appeared in print in The New Yorker on January 8, 1955, and is written in two Onegin stanzas.[6] Nabokov reproduces the poem both so that the reader of his translation would have some experience of this unique form, and also to act as a further defence of his decision to write his translation in prose.

Nabokov's previously close friend Edmund Wilson reviewed Nabokov's translation in the New York Review of Books, which sparked an exchange of letters and an enduring falling-out between them.[7]

John Bayley has described Nabokov's commentary as '"by far the most erudite as well as the most fascinating commentary in English on Pushkin's poem", and "as scrupulously accurate, in terms of grammar, sense and phrasing, as it is idiosyncratic and Nabokovian in its vocabulary". It is generally agreed that Nabokov's translation is extremely accurate.

Other English translations

Henry Spalding published a translation in 1881.[8] Ivan Turgenev called his translation astonishingly faithful, and the text remained the only complete translation for fifty years.[9] Even later, the Russian critic Ernest Simmons praised Spalding for his translation and scholarly notes on Pushkin's novel in verse.[10]

Babette Deutsch published a translation in 1935 that preserved the Onegin stanzas.

The Pushkin Press published a translation in 1937 (reprinted 1943) by the Oxford scholar Oliver Elton, with illustrations by M. V. Dobujinsky.

In 1977, Sir Charles Johnston published another translation trying to preserve the Onegin stanza, which is generally considered to surpass Arndt's. Johnston's translation is influenced by Nabokov. Vikram Seth's novel The Golden Gate was in turn inspired by this translation.

James E. Falen (the professor of Russian at the University of Tennessee) published a translation in 1995 which was also influenced by Nabokov's translation, but preserved the Onegin stanzas (ISBN 0809316307). This translation is considered to be the most faithful to Pushkin's spirit according to Russian critics and translators.

Douglas Hofstadter published a translation in 1999, again preserving the Onegin stanzas, after having summarised the controversy (and severely criticised Nabokov's attitude towards verse translation) in his book Le Ton beau de Marot. Hofstadter's translation employs a unique lexicon of both high and low register words, as well as unexpected and almost reaching rhymes that give the work a comedic flair.

Tom Beck published a translation in 2004 that also preserved the Onegin stanzas. (ISBN 1-903517-28-1)

Wordsworths Classics in 2005 published an English prose translation by Roger Clarke, which sought to retain the lyricism of Pushkin's Russian.

In September 2008, Stanley Mitchell, emeritus professor of aesthetics at the University of Derby, published, through Penguin Books, a complete translation, again preserving the Onegin stanzas in English. (ISBN 978-0-140-44810-8)

In 2022, Robert E. Tanner published a translation that preserved the Onegin stanzas and incorporated background and historical information in the interstices provided by the translation from Russian to English. (ISBN 978-0-9990737-5-9)

There are a number of lesser known English translations, at least 45 through 2016.

Into other languages

French

There are at least eight published French translations of Eugene Onegin. The most recent appeared in 2005: the translator, André Markovicz, respects Pushkin's original stanzas.[11] Other translations include those of Paul Béesau (1868), Gaston Pérot (1902, in verse), Nata Minor (who received the Prix Nelly Sachs, given to the best translation into French of poetry), Roger Legras, Maurice Colin, Michel Bayat, and Jean-Louis Backès (who does not preserve the stanzas).[12][13][14][15][16][17][18] As a 20-year-old, former French President Jacques Chirac also wrote a translation, which was never published.[19][20]

German

There are at least a dozen published translations of Onegin in German.

  • Carl Friedrich von der Borg, Eugenius Onegin, of which the first part was published in "Der Refraktor. Ein Centralblatt Deutschen Lebens in Russland", Dorpat, 1836, in five series, starting with the 14th issue on August 1, 1836, and ending with the 18th issue on August 29, 1836.
  • R. Lippert, Verlag von Wilhelm Engelmann, Leipzig 1840
  • Friedrich von Bodenstedt, Verlag der Deckerschen Geheimen Ober-Hofbuchdruckerei, Berlin 1854
  • Adolf Seubert, Reclam, Leipzig 1872/73
  • Dr. Blumenthal, Moscow 1878
  • Dr. Alexis Lupus, nur das 1. Kapitel, Leipzig and St. Petersburg 1899
  • Theodor Commichau, Verlag G. Müller, Munich and Leipzig 1916
  • Theodor Commichau and Arthur Luther, 1923
  • Theodor Commichau, Arthur Luther and Maximilian Schick, SWA-Verlag, Leipzig and Berlin 1947
  • Elfriede Eckardt-Skalberg, Verlag Bühler, Baden-Baden 1947
  • Johannes von Guenther, Reclam, Leipzig 1949
  • Theodor Commichau and Konrad Schmidt, Weimar 1958
  • Theodor Commichau and Martin Remané, Reclam, Leipzig 1965
  • Manfred von der Ropp and Felix Zielinski, Winkler, Munich 1972
  • Kay Borowsky, Reclam, Stuttgart 1972 (translation of prose)
  • Rolf-Dietrich Keil, Wilhelm Schmitz Verlag, Gießen 1980
  • Ulrich Busch, Manesse Verlag, Zurich 1981
  • Sabine Baumann, unter Mitarbeit von Christiane Körner, Stroemfeld, Frankfurt am Main 2009
  • Viktor Eduard Prieb, Goldene Rakete, Berlin 2018.

Italian

There are several Italian translations of Onegin. One of the earliest was published by G. Cassone in 1906. Ettore Lo Gatto translated the novel twice, in 1922 in prose and in 1950 in hendecasyllables.[21] More recent translations are those by Giovanni Giudici (a first version in 1975, a second one in 1990, in lines of unequal length) and by Pia Pera (1996).[22]

Hebrew

  • Avraham Shlonsky, 1937
  • Avraham Levinson, 1937

Esperanto

  • An edition translated by Nikolao Nekrasov, published by Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda in 1931.

Spanish

  • Eugene Onegin was given a direct Spanish translation preserving the original Russian poetic form with notes and illustrations by Alberto Musso Nicholas, published by Mendoza, Argentina, Zeta Publishers in April 2005.
  • Mijail Chílikov does a metrical verse translation, without rhymes (Madrid, Cátedra, 2005)
  • Other Spanish translations are in prose: Alexis Marcoff's Eugenio Onieguin (Barcelona, Ediciones del Zodíaco, 1942), by Irene Tchernova (Madrid, Aguilar, 1945), by Teresa Suero, probably from English (Barcelona, Bruguera, 1969).

Catalan

  • Arnau Barios translated the work preserving Pushkin's original stanzas and rhymes, and it was published by Club Editor in 2019.[23]
  • Xavier Roca-Ferrer translated the novel in Catalan prose, published in Barcelona, Columna, 2001.

Japanese

There are 6 or more Japanese translations of Eugene Onegin. The first two versions were published in 1921, but the most popular version was a prose translation by Kentaro Ikeda in 1964. The latest translation was one by Masao Ozawa, published in 1996, in which Ozawa attempted to translate Onegin into the form of Japanese poetry.

Chinese

Since the first Chinese version translated by Su Fu in 1942 and the first translation from original Russian version in 1944 by Lu Yin, there have been more than 10 versions translated into Chinese. In the 21st century there are still new Chinese versions being published.

Arabic

"Eugene Onegin" was translated from Russian into Arabic by the historian and researcher Abdel Hadi Al-Dheisat (عبد الهادي الدهيسات) in 2003, and the Arabic translation is in verse and took over 4 years to be completed.


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