Problems of translation: Onegin in English

Abstract

Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 essay on translating Alexsandr Pushkin’s poem Eugene Onegin criticizes several “free” English versions because they do not “reproduce” the Russian text. He describes the complicated resonances and allusions in Pushkin’s work so as to rationalize his own scholarly version of it: close to the Russian, devoid of Anglo-American poetic diction, and heavily annotated. For Nabokov, paraphrastic versions that “conform to the notions and prejudices of a given public” constitute the worst “evil” of translation.

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