Set in imperial Russia during the 1820s, Pushkin's novel in verse follows the emotions and destiny of three men - Onegin the bored fop, Lensky the minor elegiast,& a stylized Pushkin himself - and the fates and affections of three women - Tatyana the provincial beauty, her sister Olga, & Pushkin's mercurial Muse. Eugene Onegin is the master work of the poet whom Russians regard as the fountainhead of their literature. Influeneced by Byron, Pushkin reveals the nature of his heroes through the emotional colorations found in their witty remarks, nature descriptions, and unexpected actions, all conveyed in stanzas of sonnet length (a form which became known as the Onegin Stanza), faithfully reproduced by Walter Arndt inthis Bollingen Prize translation. By turns brilliant, entertaining, romantic and serious, it traces the development of a young Petersburg dandy as he deals with life and love. Pushkin's "novel in verse" has influenced Russian prose as well as poetry for more than a century.
This edition belatedly fulfills this wish, with Nabokov’s English presented alongside the original in Cyrillic, accompanied by a transliteration the eye can easily skip between the languages.This is the widely acclaimed translation of Russian literature's most seminal work.
But his publishers found the cost to be prohibitive. He had hoped for his translation to be faced line for line with the Russian original and a transliteration, with stress marked in all words of more than one syllable. His wife Véra asked him “Why don’t you translate it yourself?” He soon realized there was no viable alternative. Aware that it was “the backbone of the study of Russian literature”, he read the existing translations in disgust and despair, finding himself obliged to revise every line.
Nabokov began to think about translating Eugene Onegin as soon as he settled in Ithaca at the end of the summer of 1948 and started preparing for his first year of teaching Russian literature students at Cornell. He once predicted: “I shall be remembered for Lolita and my work on Eugene Onegin”. Far surpassing his other translating was the effort he expended on Pushkin. Vladimir Nabokov was not only a great writer but also an astonishing translator.
0 kommentar(er)
