I finally got around to reading what many regard as the father and mother of Russian literature, Yevgeny Onegin by Aleksandr Pushkin. So many of my Russian friends talked about this poem to me in tones that were almost sacred and urged me to read it. I don't know why it took me so long to read it given my interest in Russian fiction. I had read Homer's somewhat similar poetry novels the Iliad and the Odyssey in my youth, poetry novels that point up the impact of Greek and Roman (including Byzantine) literary culture literature on Russian literary culture.
I found Onegin very interesting in a number of ways. I found its mixture of what in retrospect we might call its modernism and postmodernism fascinating. I found its detours into debates in Russian culture interesting. But most of all, what I, someone who is fascinated by the translator's art, found most interesting about Onegin, was the public status accorded the different translations of Pushkin's poem-novel.
I read two translations of Onegin simultaneously, the Oxford World's Classics translation by Russian scholar James Falen, and a translation done by Mary Hobson for the Russian School in Moscow and published by the Anthem Press in London. I found reading both of them in tandem, stanza by stanza or canto by canto, helpful as I navigated my way through the formal maze that is the Onegin stanza.
Falen's translation, published by a major press, the Oxford University Press in the 1990s, has gotten a lot of attention from the culture industry. For many critics it is one of the best translations of the epic poem that tries, as best as it can, to keep to the rhythms and rhymes of the original, something the noted emigre Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov thought impossible and criticised the attempt to do so in one of the first post World War II translations of Onegin, that of Walter Arndt. On the other hand, I have heard and read very little about Mary Hobson's translation published in 2011.
Perhaps the key to understanding why this is the case is the fact that Hobson's translation was published by a small press, Anthem. I have heard and read much about other translations of Onegin published by major presses whether Charles Johnston's for Penguin or Stanley Mitchell's for Penguin. I have heard and read very little about Anthony Briggs's translation for the Pushkin Press, Roger Clarke's translation for Alma, which also includes the Russian text, or Tom Beck's translation for Dedalus, all of which, seem to me, as good, if not better, than the translations published by major publishers. There are, it seems, variations in the cultural capital of publishers and it matters when it comes to publicity and word of mouth.
