Robert E. Tanner’s Pushkin.

Venya Gushchin reviews (for the Brooklyn Rail, “an independent forum for arts, culture, and politics throughout New York City and far beyond”) what sounds like an interesting translation-cum-adaptation of one of the most famous works of Russian literature:

The plot of Eugene Onegin, Aleksandr Pushkin’s famous novel-in-verse, is barebones. Our eponymous hero is a Byronic fop, bored by aristocratic life in early nineteenth-century Saint Petersburg. After moving to his inherited estate, he meets his friend Vladimir Lensky’s fiancée’s sister Tatiana Larin. She falls in love with Eugene Onegin, who condescendingly rejects her. After an ill-fated ball, Onegin kills Lensky in a duel. Years later, back in Saint Petersburg, Onegin sees a now married Tatiana. Now it’s his turn to confess his love and be symmetrically rejected. Unlike in the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, there is no intricate network of characters, no metaphysical quest for the meaning of life itself.

Instead, Pushkin gives us sparkling, encyclopedic digressions on urban and countryside Russian life. The poet-narrator is as much a character as those outlined above, his asides and personality at times overtaking narration in feats of dexterous versification. Most famous among these digressions is his stylistically varied confession to a foot fetish. […]

I quote these nimble variations on a theme from Robert E. Tanner’s recent Ambivalent Souls: A True Translation of Alexander Pushkin’s ‘Eugene Onegin’. […] In Ambivalent Souls is not a timeless classic, but a messy, constantly shifting text, always approached from a particular historical perspective. […] With notable exceptions like Boris Dralyuk’s My Hollywood and Maggie Millner’s Couplets, contemporary formal verse can sound archaic or child-like. Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous literal translation of Eugene Onegin dispenses with form altogether, the text’s “greatness” conveyed instead through two volumes of commentary. Formal fidelity, chosen by others like Charles Johnston, can at times result in accurate but dated versions that fail to capture the narrator’s chattiness. Tanner makes Pushkin as fluid and glittering in English as he is to contemporary Russian readers.

So why the change of title? Eugene Onegin has multiple stanzas and lines omitted in standard editions of text, seemingly the result of self- and tsarist censorship. Tanner fills in each of the omitted lines and stanzas with his own reflections on the novel through the lens of Nabokov’s translation and commentary, his personal experience learning Russian, and early 2020s America—keeping the form all the way through. These additional digressions contribute to the cheeky and glancing rhythm that defines the original. From the foot fetish digression, the italics marking Tanner’s additions:

    … I love their feet
   (or legs – for Russian lacks discrete
   expressions. Really. And in folly
   I wonder, where did Pushkin stare
   when claiming but three shapely pair
   in all of Russia?) Melancholy,
   cool, he remembers yet each one,
   and in his dream his heart’s undone.

A side-by-side comparison of Ambivalent Souls and Eugene Onegin shows the translator adding where no lines were omitted. […] When I described Ambivalent Souls to my colleagues, they responded with some version of “Oh, so it’s more of an adaptation.” However, Tanner’s text, true to its subtitle, is a translation. In his recent The Philosophy of Translation, Damion Searls argues that, rather than providing a word-for-word reproduction of a text in another language, a translation is a record of a reader’s experience of the original. Ambivalent Souls captures Tanner’s experience of Eugene Onegin, including the multiple historical layers that separate him from the original and his means of making sense of it.

Last semester, I took a risk and assigned Tanner’s “true translation” for an undergraduate survey course on Russian literature and culture—to great success (“I normally don’t read anything poetic, but this was cool,” etc.). In the classroom, Ambivalent Souls allowed me to demonstrate the deadening effects of canonization, how revering texts puts them behind cabinet glass and limits our experience of them. What Tanner does for Pushkin should be done for all “great writers”—beyond translations, think of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet or Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea as a post-colonial prequel to Jane Eyre. The translator’s self-insertions rescue Pushkin’s novel-in-verse, foot fetish and all, from the stuffy air of “greatness” and brings its voice back to life.

Once upon a time I would have shuddered at the idea, but (perhaps prompted by Christopher Logue’s “accounts” of the Iliad — see this 2003 post) I’ve come to not only tolerate but welcome such transmogrifications. Let a hundred Homers, and Onegins, bloom; what’s important is that people keep being suckered in by the changing barkers at the tent, and once they’re inside they can absorb as much as they want of the Crazed Achilles (see him rage!) and the Petersburg Fop (see him beg forgiveness at the feet of the woman he scorned!). Come one, come all! Literature is news that STAYS news!