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Poetry
Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, trans. James E. Falen (Oxford University
Press, 1990/1995, 240pp pb $8.95). On of the happiest byproducts of
reading Hofstadter's Le Ton beau de Marot was his intense analysis of
four translations of Pushkin's verse novel Eugene Onegin. Having seen
references to Pushkin many times in Russian writing, I decided it was
about time I read his most famous work. So I sought and found a copy
of the best of the four translations Hofstadter examined, and both
Kristine and I read it. In some senses, because we live surrounded by
cultural attitudes that Pushkin helped create, the story was
unsurprising; and verse fiction takes so many more lines to cover the
same amount of ground that the story ends up rather thin. Despite that,
however, the story remained powerful and Falen's translation was a
constant delight. (Falen deals with the problem of translation by being a
damn fine writer of verse himself -- which is, in the end, the only
solution.)
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