Eugene Onegin Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Eugene Onegin Book

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 DaviesRead More

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  • Product Description

    In time for the bicentennial of Pushkin's birth, a wonderful new translation of his classic novel by Douglas R. Hofstadter, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gdel, Escher, Bach and Le Ton beau de Marot

    When Alexander Pushkin published his classic romantic novel of thwarted love and conflicting loyalties in 1833, readers found the entire work had been composed in a unique sonnet form with an intricate rhythmic and rhyming structure.

    Not only is Douglas Hofstadter's new translation of Eugene Onegin written in Pushkin stanzas, but his preface, discussing Pushkin, his novel, its form and content, and the challenges of translation, is written in the same verse form. Hofstadter's version is, however, distinctly American and colloquial in style, and playful with punning and alliteration.

    Fans of Hofstadter's Le Ton beau de Marot will be delighted to see his meticulous theories of translation put into practice in what seems destined to become the definitive English-language version of Eugene Onegin. It is sure to bring new and deserving readers to this neglected literary jewel.

  • 0465020933
  • 9780465020935
  • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
  • 1 July 1999
  • Basic Books
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 208
  • New edition
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