Customer Reviews

Eugene Onegin: Translation By Douglas R. Hofstadter

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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.

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.

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.

There are many similarities between Pushkin and Tchaikovsky in real life as well as in art. The Russian poet and the Russian composer together weave a story that is unforgettable adapted for the operatic stage to create Russia's most famous operatic work. The Letter Aria, in which a young girl pours out her heart to a man she has barely met and suffers from his rejection took place in real life when a young woman wrote to Tchaikovsky and he could not bear to see her hurt by his rejection, so he married her...with disastrous results. A duel takes place in the lives of the characters in Eugene Onegin and took place in Pushkin's real life. To follow the lives of Russia's top poet and top composer is to know Eugene Onegin. For this reason, I ordered and read the poem, followed by a biography of Tchsikovsky, and will be speaking on the opera in the fall when it is performed at Los Angeles Opera. Studying these two artists is truly a joy and a learning process on the subject of Russian culture. Students of poetry, literature, Russian history/culture, and opera/music will love reading Eugene Onegin. I certainly did. Thank you, Amazon, for providing the materials to enable my upcoming talks on the opera based upon Pushkin's poem, with the music by Peter Tchaikovsky.

Some of the reviews above as well as the NYT book review blasted the work for being bad poetry. I would agree that, yes, Hofstadter may not have the greatest ear for artistic language and the translation often sounds heavy-handed in English, whereas every single word in the original is light as a feather. As I recall, DF acknowledges the drawbacks of his version in his intro and praises some other work, notably Falen. Nevertheless, being fluent in both English and Russian, I think this translation is an incredible achievement. While the James Falen translation is usually better in language, what Hofstadter has done here - faithfully mimic every single beat of the rhyme - is enourmously difficult. It is by far the best way for a foreigner to see how the verses really sound in the original.

Hofstadter is a brilliant man, with no ear for poetry. One aspect of human intelligence that computers have some hope of matching is pattern recognition. This, perhaps, has led computer scientist Hofstadter to value pattern (rhyme, meter) in poetry at the expense of sense and, above all, tone. Both in this translation and in his fascinating and infuriating "Le Ton Beau de Marot" he shows a near-complete obliviousness to the nuances of tone that words bring with them. Try the Falen translation instead.

What soars higher from the common ground of humanity then a bouncing spirit of ideas chiming with the music of life-poetry? I myself am fully convinced of the existence of the Russian psyche: the dark shadow of eternal glory framed forever in the heart of revolutions. Then not so surprisingly, I became enamored with another Byronic hero portrayed by a great romantic, Pushkin, prince of poetry. Once I heard that all Russian children learn to recite from Eugene Onegin, what better way to celebrate and to honor one of the greatest treasures Mother Russia has to offer? It's his genius to master the rhythm of words in composing music with nothing but phrases-full of voices. The power and beauty of Eugene Onegin are overpowering to the eyes as well as the ears. Perhaps some of its original luster is lost through translations, but English has a certain vibration of its own to re-create the magic of verses. A story of love and of betrayal, Eugene Onegin evolves around a restless, dashing aristocratic who finds himself constantly trapped in intrigues and conquests. During a period of idleness, Onegin evokes love in a passionate Tatyana near his country estate. After refusing Tatyana's audacious confession of love, Onegin destroys his one chance of true happiness by provoking his best friend to duel. Years later, finding himself "a victim of the cruel disease of apathy, his life adrift: no work, no wish, no wife", Eugene Onegin falls for his formal admirer who is now a brilliant enchantress of the St. Petersburg society. Perhaps his revived memories serve as a distinct contrast to his present, Eugene Onegin regrets his blindness when the one woman who understood his heart revealed her deepest emotions only to be confronted by soft mockery from jaded lips.

Oh, Fate has fled with far too much! / Blest he who quit life's celebration / ne'er having seen its full design, / nor having drained his cup of wine; / who shelved the book of life's narration / before he'd read its final line, / as I know, with Onegin mine.

Summed up in his final words of the novel, Pushkin's last stroke completes the luscious painting of one man's psyche against the backdrop of a sumptuous St. Petersburg. A work of great details that draws every minute sensibilities together into one continuous threat of emotions, Eugene Onegin laments the loss of innocence and of truth in an age of revolutions when new ideas challenge the existing order of morality. Thus through one man's loss, Pushkin relates the so-called progress and its influence on the mind as well as the heart in saying "our race, rash and impetuous, ascends and has its day, then raves and hastens toward ancestral graves". The readers witness the death of Onegin's soul as Tatyana returns to her assumed position in society playing another fool of love.