This is not only understandable, it’s useful. And when he translated it himself, Nabokov produced a version more famous for its idiosyncrasies than for its poetry.Īnthony Briggs, prefacing his new translation, devotes nine pages to the work as a whole and 24 to the problems of translation (nearly three of which deal with the Yevgeny/Eugene issue alone). Nabokov was not the only person to have said that a knowledge of Russian is essential to fully appreciate the genius of the poem (or novel, if the idea of a poem this long makes you anxious). So: translating 5,500 lines of verse, arranged in 14-line stanzas of a scheme so complex and original it’s called “the Pushkin sonnet” or “the Onegin stanza” isn’t a ride through the park in a troika, especially when you consider that the original is famously allusive, deft, subtle and multi-layered, tonally inspired by Byron’s ottava rima in Don Juan, but far tighter in execution. Most English translations do not keep the Russian spelling, which is odd as the name is an occasional part of the poetry, not least in its final line it has, in other words, a key role in the rhythm. I imagine that even the decision not to Anglicise the hero’s name to Eugene took time. It’s taken 15 years to get round to the famous verse-novel about the bored, hapless aristo Yevgeny Onegin, but then the first English translation didn’t appear until 1881, 50 years after the work had been completed, so perhaps we should appreciate the difficulty of the exercise (the next English translation didn’t appear until 50 years after that).

P ushkin Press has finally done it: it has published the key work of the writer it is named after.

Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin