The country place where Eugene
moped was a charming nook;
a friend of innocent delights
4 might have blessed heaven there.
The manor house, secluded,
screened from the winds by a hill, stood
above a river; in the distance,
8 before it, freaked and flowered, lay
meadows and golden grainfields;
one could glimpse hamlets here and there;
herds roamed the meadows;
12 and its dense coverts spread
a huge neglected garden, the retreat
of pensive dryads.
The venerable castle
was built as castles should be built:
excellent strong and comfortable
4 in the taste of sensible ancientry.
Tall chambers everywhere,
hangings of damask in the drawing room,
portraits of grandsires on the walls,
8 and stoves with varicolored tiles.
All this today is obsolete,
I really don't know why;
and anyway it was a matter
12 of very little moment to my friend,
since he yawned equally amidst
modish and olden halls.
He settled in that chamber where the rural
old-timer had for forty years or so
squabbled with his housekeeper,
4 looked through the window, and squashed flies.
It all was plain: a floor of oak, two cupboards,
a table, a divan of down,
and not an ink speck anywhere. Onegin
8 opened the cupboards; found in one
a notebook of expenses and in the other
a whole array of fruit liqueurs,
pitchers of eau-de-pomme,
12 and the calendar for eighteen-eight:
having a lot to do, the old man never
looked into any other books.
Alone midst his possessions,
merely to while away the time,
at first conceived the plan our Eugene
4 of instituting a new system.
In his backwoods a solitary sage,
the ancient corvée's yoke
by the light quitrent he replaced;
8 the muzhik blessed fate,
while in his corner went into a huff,
therein perceiving dreadful harm,
his thrifty neighbor.
and all concluded with one voice that he
was a most dangerous eccentric.
At first they all would call on him,
but since to the back porch
habitually a Don stallion
as soon as one made out along the highway
the sound of their domestic runabouts —
outraged by such behavior,
8 they all ceased to be friends with him.
“Our neighbor is a boor; acts like a crackbrain;
he's a Freemason; he
drinks only red wine, by the tumbler;
12 he won't go up to kiss a lady's hand;
'tis all ‘yes,’ ‘no’ — he'll not say ‘yes, sir,’
or ‘no, sir.’ ” This was the general voice.
At that same time a new landowner
had driven down to his estate
and in the neighborhood was giving cause
4 for just as strict a scrutiny.
By name Vladimir Lenski,
with a soul really Göttingenian,
a handsome chap, in the full bloom of years,
8 Kant's votary, and a poet.
From misty Germany
he'd brought the fruits of learning:
liberty-loving dreams, a spirit
12 impetuous and rather queer,
a speech always enthusiastic,
and shoulder-length black curls.
From the world's cold depravity
not having yet had time to wither,
his soul was warmed by a friend's greeting,
4 by the caress of maidens.
He was in matters of the heart
a charming dunce. Hope nursed him,
and the globe's new glitter and noise
8 still captivated his young mind.
With a sweet fancy he amused
his heart's incertitudes.
The purpose of our life to him
12 was an enticing riddle;
he racked his brains
over it and suspected marvels.
He believed that a kindred soul
to him must be united;
that, cheerlessly pining away,
4 she daily kept awaiting him;
he believed that his friends were ready to accept
chains for his honor
and that their hands would falter not in smashing
8 the vessel of his slanderer;
that there were some chosen by fate
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
12 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Indignation, compassion,
pure love of Good,
and fame's delicious torment
4 early had stirred his blood.
He wandered with a lyre on earth.
Under the sky of Schiller and of Goethe,
with their poetic fire
and the exalted Muses of the art
he, happy one, did not disgrace:
he proudly in his songs retained
12 always exalted sentiments,
the surgings of a virgin fancy, and the charm
of grave simplicity.
To love submissive, love he sang,
and his song was as clear
as a naïve maid's thoughts,
4 as the sleep of an infant, as the moon
in the untroubled deserts of the sky,
goddess of mysteries and tender sighs.
He sang parting and sadness,
8 and a vague something, and the dim
remoteness, and romantic roses.
He sang those distant lands
where long into the bosom of the stillness
12 flowed his live tears.
He sang life's faded bloom
at not quite eighteen years of age.
In the wilderness where Eugene alone
was able to appreciate his gifts,
he cared not for the banquets of the masters
he fled their noisy concourse.
Their reasonable talk
of haymaking, of liquor,
8 of kennel, of their kin,
no doubt did not sparkle with feeling,
or with poetic fire,
or sharp wit, or intelligence,
12 or with the art of sociability;
but the talk of their sweet wives was
much less intelligent.
Wealthy, good-looking, Lenski everywhere
was as a marriageable man received:
such is the country custom;
4 all for their daughters planned a match
with the half-Russian neighbor.
Whenever he drops in, at once the conversation
broaches a word, obliquely,
8 about the tedium of bachelor life;
the neighbor is invited to the samovar,
and Dunya pours the tea;
they whisper to her: “Dunya, mark!”
12 Then the guitar (that, too) is brought,
and she will start to shrill (good God!):
“Come to me in my golden castle!..”
12 But Lenski, having no desire, of course,
to bear the bonds of marriage,
wished cordially to strike up with Onegin
4 a close acquaintanceship.
They got together; wave and stone,
verse and prose, ice and flame,
were not so different from one another.
8 At first, because of mutual
disparity, they found each other dull;
then liked each other; then
met riding every day on horseback,
12 and soon became inseparable.
Thus people — I'm the first to own it —
out of do-nothingness are friends.
But among us there's even no such friendship:
having destroyed all prejudices, we
deem all men naughts
We all aspire to be Napoleons;
for us the millions
of two-legged creatures are but tools;
8 feeling to us is weird and ludicrous.
More tolerant than many was Eugene,
though he, of course, knew men
and on the whole despised them;
12 but no rules are without exceptions:
some people he distinguished greatly
and, though estranged from it, respected feeling.
He listened with a smile to Lenski:
the poet's fervid conversation,
and mind still vacillant in judgments,
4 and gaze eternally inspired —
all this was novel to Onegin;
the chilling word
on his lips he tried to restrain,
8 and thought: foolish of me
to interfere with his brief rapture;
without me just as well that time will come;
meanwhile let him live and believe
12 in the perfection of the world;
let us forgive the fever of young years
both its young ardor and young ravings.
Between them everything engendered
discussions and led to reflection:
the pacts of bygone races,
4 the fruits of learning, Good and Evil,
and centuried prejudices,
and the grave's fateful mysteries,
destiny and life in their turn —
8 all was subjected to their judgment.
The poet in the heat of his contentions
recited, in a trance, meantime,
fragments of Nordic poems,
although he did not understand them much,
would dutifully listen to the youth.
But passions occupied more often
the minds of my two anchorets.
Having escaped from their tumultuous power,
with an involuntary sigh of regret.
Happy who knew their agitations
and finally detached himself from them;
8 still happier who did not know them, who
cooled love with separation, enmity
with obloquy; sometimes
with friends and wife yawned, undisturbed
and the safe capital of forefathers
did not entrust to a perfidious deuce!
When we have flocked under the banner
of sage tranquillity,
when the flame of the passions has gone out
4 and laughable become to us
their waywardness
or surgings and belated echoes;
reduced to sense not without trouble,
8 sometimes we like to listen
to the tumultuous language of the passions
of others, and it stirs our heart;
exactly thus an old disabled soldier
12 does willingly bend an assiduous ear
to the yarns of young mustached braves,
[while he remains] forgotten in his shack.
Now flaming youthhood, on the other hand,
cannot hide anything:
enmity, love, sadness, and joy
4 'tis ready to blab out.
Deemed invalided as to love,
with a grave air Onegin listened
as, loving the confession of the heart,
8 the poet his whole self expressed.
His trustful conscience
naïvely he laid bare.
Eugene learned without trouble
12 the youthful story of his love —
a tale abounding in emotions
long since not new to us.
Ah, he loved as one loves
no longer in our years; as only
the mad soul of a poet
4 is still condemned to love:
always, and everywhere, one reverie,
one customary wish,
one customary woe!
8 Neither the cooling distance,
nor the long years of separation,
nor hours given to the Muses,
nor foreign beauties,
12 nor noise of merriments, nor studies,
had changed in him a soul
warmed by a virgin fire.
When scarce a boy, by Olga captivated,
not having known yet torments of the heart,
he'd been a tender witness
4 of her infantine frolics.
He, in the shade of a protective park,
had shared her frolics,
and for these children wedding crowns
8 their fathers, who were friends and neighbors, destined.
In the backwoods, beneath a humble roof,
full of innocent charm,
she under the eyes of her parents
12 bloomed like a hidden lily of the valley
which is unknown in the dense grass
to butterflies or to the bee.
She gave the poet the first dream
of youthful transports,
and the thought of her animated
Farewell, golden games! He
began to like thick groves,
seclusion, stillness, and the night,
8 and the stars, and the moon —
the moon, celestial lamp,
to which we dedicated
walks midst the evening darkness,
12 and tears, of secret pangs the solace...
But now we only see in her
a substitute for bleary lanterns.
Always modest, always obedient,
always as merry as the morn,
as naïve as a poet's life,
4 as winsome as love's kiss;
her eyes, as azure as the sky,
smile, flaxen locks,
movements, voice, light waist — everything
8 in Olga... but take any novel,
and you will surely find
her portrait; it is very sweet;
I liked it once myself,
12 but it has come to bore me beyond measure.
Let me, my reader,
take up the elder sister.
Her sister
For the first time a novel's tender pages
4 with such a name we willfully shall grace.
What of it? It is pleasing, sonorous,
but from it, I know, is inseparable
the memory of ancientry
8 or housemaids' quarters. We must all
admit that we have very little
taste even in our names
(to say nothing of verses);
12 enlightenment does not suit us,
and what we have derived from it
is affectation — nothing more.
So she was called
Tatiana. Neither with her sister's beauty
nor with her [sister's] rosy freshness
4 would she attract one's eyes.
Sauvage, sad, silent,
as timid as the sylvan doe,
in her own family
8 she seemed a strangeling.
She knew not how to snuggle up
to her father or mother;
a child herself, among a crowd of children,
12 she never wished to play and skip,
and often all day long, alone,
she sat in silence by the window.
Pensiveness, her companion,
even from cradle days,
adorned for her with dreams
4 the course of rural leisure.
Her delicate fingers
knew needles not; over the tambour bendin
with a silk pattern she
Sign of the urge to domineer:
the child with her obedient doll
prepares in play
12 for etiquette, law of the
monde, and gravely to her doll repeats the lessons
of her mamma;
but even in those years Tatiana
did not take in her hands a doll;
about town news, about the fashions,
4 did not converse with it;
and childish pranks
to her were foreign; grisly tales
in winter, in the dark of nights,
8 charmed more her heart.
Whenever nurse assembled
for Olga, on the spacious lawn,
all her small girl companions,
12 she did not play at barleybreaks,
dull were to her both ringing laughter
and noise of their giddy diversions.
She on the balcony
liked to prevene Aurora's rise,
when, in the pale sky, disappears
4 the choral dance of stars,
and earth's rim softly lightens,
and, morning's herald, the wind whiffs,
and rises by degrees the day.
8 In winter, when night's shade
possesses longer half the world,
and longer in the idle stillness,
by the bemisted moon,
12 the lazy orient sleeps,
awakened at her customary hour
she would get up by candles.
She early had been fond of novels;
for her they replaced all;
she grew enamored with the fictions
4 of Richardson and of Rousseau.
Her father was a kindly fellow
who lagged in the precedent age
but saw no harm in books;
deemed them an empty toy,
nor did he care
what secret tome his daughter had
12 dozing till morn under her pillow.
As to his wife, she was herself
mad upon Richardson.
The reason she loved Richardson
was not that she had read him,
and not that Grandison
4 to Lovelace she preferred;
14 but anciently, Princess Alina,
her Moscow maiden cousin,
would often talk to her about them.
8 Her husband at that time still was
her fiancé, but against her will.
She sighed after another
whose heart and mind
12 were much more to her liking;
that Grandison was a great dandy,
a gamester, and an Ensign in the Guards.
Like him, she always
dressed in the fashion and becomingly;
but without asking her advice
4 they took the maiden to the altar;
and to dispel her grief
the sensible husband repaired
soon to his countryseat, where she,
8 God knows by whom surrounded, tossed
and wept at first,
almost divorced her husband, then
got occupied with household matters, grew
12 habituated, and became content.
Habit to us is given from above:
it is a substitute for happiness.
15 Habit allayed the grief
that nothing else could ward;
a big discovery soon came
4 to comfort her completely.
Between the dally and the do
a secret she discovered: how to govern
her husband monocratically,
8 and forthwith everything went right.
She would drive out to supervise the farming,
she pickled mushrooms for the winter,
she kept the books, “shaved foreheads,”
12 to the bathhouse would go on Saturdays,
walloped her maids when cross —
all this without asking her husband's leave.
Time was, she wrote in blood
in tender maidens' albums,
would call Praskóvia “Polína,”
4 and speak in singsong tones;
very tight stays she wore,
and knew how to pronounce a Russian n
as if it were a French one, through the nose;
8 but soon all this ceased to exist; stays, album,
Princess [Alina],
cahier of sentimental verselets, she
forgot, began to call
12 “Akúl'ka” the one-time “Selína,”
and finally inaugurated
the quilted chamber robe and mobcap.
But dearly did her husband love her,
he did not enter in her schemes,
on every score lightheartedly believed her
4 whilst in his dressing gown he ate and drank
His life rolled comfortably on;
at evenfall sometimes assembled
a kindly group of neighbors,
to rue, to tattle,
to chuckle over this or that.
Time passed; meanwhile
12 Olga was told to prepare tea;
then supper came, and then 'twas bedtime,
and off the guests would drive.
They in their peaceful life preserved
the customs of dear ancientry:
with them, during fat Butterweek
4 Russian pancakes were wont to be.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
12 kvas was as requisite to them as air,
and at their table dishes were presented
to guests in order of their rank.
And thus they both grew old,
and the grave's portals
opened at last before the husband,
4 and a new crown upon him was bestowed.
He died at the hour before the midday meal,
bewailed by neighbor,
children, and faithful wife,
8 more candidly than some.
He was a simple and kind squire,
and there where lies his dust
the monument above the grave proclaims:
12 “The humble sinner Dmitri Larin,
slave of our Lord, and Brigadier,
enjoyeth peace beneath this stone.”
Restored to his penates,
Vladimir Lenski visited
his neighbor's humble monument,
4 and to the ashes consecrated
a sigh, and long his heart was melancholy.
“Poor Yorick!”
16 mournfully he uttered, “he
hath borne me in his arms.
8 How oft I played in childhood
with his Ochákov medal!
He destined Olga to wed me;
he used to say: ‘Shall I be there
12 to see the day?’ ” and full of sincere sadness,
Vladimir there and then set down for him
a gravestone madrigal.
And with a sad inscription,
in tears, he also honored there his father's
and mother's patriarchal dust.
4 Alas! Upon life's furrows,
in a brief harvest, generations
by Providence's secret will
rise, ripen, and must fall;
8 others in their tracks follow.... Thus
our giddy race
waxes, stirs, seethes,
and tombward crowds its ancestors.
12 Our time likewise will come, will come,
and one fine day our grandsons
out of the world will crowd us too.
Meanwhile enjoy your fill of it
— of this lightsome life, friends!
Its insignificance I realize
4 and little am attached to it;
to phantoms I have closed my eyelids;
but distant hopes
sometimes disturb my heart:
8 without an imperceptible trace, I'd be sorry
to leave the world.
I live, I write not for the sake of praise;
but my sad lot, meseems,
12 I would desire to glorify,
so that a single sound at least
might, like a faithful friend, remind one about me.
And it will touch
the heart of someone; and preserved by fate,
perhaps in Lethe will not drown
4 the strophe made by me;
perhaps — flattering hope! —
a future dunce will point
at my famed portrait
8 and utter: “
That now was a poet!”
So do accept my thanks, admirer
of the peaceful Aonian maids,
0 you whose memory will preserve
12 my volatile creations,
you whose benevolent hand will pat
the old man's laurels!
