Eugene Onegin: Translation By Douglas R. Hofstadter [Hardcover]

Alexander Pushkin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 22, 1999

Sparked by reading Jim Falen’s beautiful English version of Eugene Onegin (published in 1992), Douglas Hofstadter presents a more liberal, distinctly American, colloquial version of the Alexander Pushkin classic. Hofstadter’s version is entirely in so-called “Onegin stanzas”—a unique sonnet form devised by Pushkin with a very intricate rhythmic and rhyming pattern. There is also a preface in Onegin stanzas, in which Hofstadter talks about Pushkin, his novel in verse, its form and content, the challenges of translating it into English and his deep admiration for Falen’s version.This work will correspond with Pushkin’s 200th anniversary; thus, it should be a timely and well accepted literary gem.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The supreme poet of the Russian language, Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin has had a checkered existence in English. His prose, to be sure, has presented his translators with a less formidable set of hurdles. But Pushkin composed his masterpiece, Eugene Onegin, in a 14-line stanza of his own invention, with a slippery rhyme scheme and treacherously foursquare meter (i.e., iambic tetrameter, which tends to sound slightly singsong to English speakers). This has forced most of his translators--from Walter Arndt to James Falen to Charles Johnston--to shortchange form in favor of content. Vladimir Nabokov probably pushed this tendency as far as it could go, transforming Pushkin's poetry into perversely lumpy paragraphs (and enveloping the slim pickings of his translation in a jumbo-sized commentary). But nobody has managed to produce even a halfway-definitive version of Eugene Onegin.

Now Douglas Hofstadter, who's best known for Gödel, Escher, Bach, has taken a shot at it. Certainly he's no stranger to translation theory--his 1997 book, Le Ton Beau de Marot, was a brilliant and unbuttoned meditation on the translator's art, with numerous detours into the hinterlands of cognitive science. Theory and practice are two different matters, however, as Hofstadter is quick to admit: "The thought seemed quite ridiculous: me, with such sparse knowledge of Russian, hoping to clamber up this formidable Everest of translation, a book often said to be next to untranslatable, and square at the center of the inner circle of Russian literature!" Clamber he did, however--and the result is a charming if uneven version of the poem, more beholden to Cole Porter and Ogden Nash than the poet's 19th-century peers. Several of Hofstadter's slangier couplets might have Nabokov spinning in his grave: "Did thus our party boy exhaust / Himself at games, at zero cost?" Still, he manages some of Pushkin's loop-the-loops very nicely:

The air grew warm as days went flying,
And winter knew to call it quits.
Eugene gave up his versifying,
But not the ghost, and not his wits.
He's lent new life by buds aborning,
And first thing on some clear spring morning
He leaves his cloistered, small château
Where, marmot-like, he'd braved the snow.

Clearly Hofstadter's take on the poem goes heavy on the sizzle and fails to capture much of Pushkin's elegant gravity. Still, it's a welcome addition to the ranks, a handsome present to the poet on the occasion of his 200th birthday--and, rather winningly, a linguistic labor of love. --William Davies

From Booklist

The first, most famous, and greatest novel in verse is the best known--by Russians--work in Russian literature, Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. Englished many times in this century, here it is again by the author of the 1979 intellectual best-seller Godel Escher Bach, who prefaces his handiwork with a delightful explanation of the novel's verse form, how he came to translate it, his procedure as a basically non-Russian-speaking translator, and his travels, thanks to an American descendant of Pushkin, to the poet's St. Petersburg apartment, in which he translated the novel's last stanza. Pushkin's story of a rich, bored young man who rather offhandedly destroys his chance at love by killing a friend in a duel and alienating his would-be beloved is equally delightful in Hofstadter's sparkling, breezy version that catches the novel's combination of wry, Austenish provincial romance and Byronic irony, digressiveness, and satire. Comedy doesn't come more ultimately tragic, nor tragedy more bitterly comic. Many thanks to Hofstadter for a job well done, just in time for the Pushkin bicentennial. Ray Olson

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (April 22, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465020933
• ISBN-13: 978-0465020935
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,422,294 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A dance to the music of language, June 29, 1999

By 

brady kelso - See all my reviews

This review is from: Eugene Onegin: Translation By Douglas R. Hofstadter (Hardcover)

I am currently reading Hofstadter's new translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin and I must say it's one of the finest translations I've read. While I have yet to read the Falen translation, I've read others, including Nabokov's, and Hofstadter's seems the freshest, the most vigorous, and certainly the most enjoyable. What a splendid job he's done. The introduction on how he worked with the original is a "must read" for anyone interested in the joys and pitfalls of translation work.

11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars An Insult to Poetry, September 9, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Eugene Onegin: Translation By Douglas R. Hofstadter (Hardcover)

My best advice to you (the prospective reader) would be to consult the complete New York Times Review before even thinking about buying this so-called translation. Mr. Hofstadter has wide-ranging interests, and his enthusiasm is laudable, but it is sadly not married to a disciplined or artistic sensibility. He has no ear for language; he thinks that poetry is merely a matter of sing-song rhythm and relentless rhyme; he has no sense of the magical qualities of certain words in certain combinations. This is an amateur's hack-job of a translation, made more egregious by the arrogance of the translator.

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars An insult to poetry, September 5, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Eugene Onegin: Translation By Douglas R. Hofstadter (Hardcover)

Mr. Hofstadter doesn't know the first thing about the art of poetry; and he seems to think that obvious rhymes and an unbending, irritating sing-song meter suffice to reflect Pushkin's peerless music. This is an amateur's hack-job of translation, including some of the most horrendous word usages I have ever seen in print.