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[books 2012] Eugene Oneigin
24. Eugene Oneigin by Alexander Pushkin, translated by Stanley Mitchell
I spent a lot of my early to mid 20s obsessively reading Russian literature, yet somehow never got around to this.
It's absolutely lovely. The reason I include the translator in the title at top is the accessibility and beauty of it is entirely down to the translation. He tells the story yet uses the same verse forms (the interplay between different forms depending on whether it's narrative or digression is essential), which can't be easy with a language like Russian whose structure is quite different from English.
It's largely an homage to Byron, but also a commentary on the state of Russian literature. It is Very Russian - in short, very tragic and quite political.
Accessible yet complex in all types of ways, and just gorgeous. Definitely a keeper.
My next Russian Lit project is War and Peace, which my mother kindly bought me for Christmas. I've leafed through it and think I'm very much NOT in love with the translation, so if anyone has any better suggestions, I'm interested. Interestingly, my edition of Anna Karenina is a hardcover from 1947, and I really hated the translation of that too. I'm beginning to wonder if it's a Tolstoy thing.
I spent a lot of my early to mid 20s obsessively reading Russian literature, yet somehow never got around to this.
It's absolutely lovely. The reason I include the translator in the title at top is the accessibility and beauty of it is entirely down to the translation. He tells the story yet uses the same verse forms (the interplay between different forms depending on whether it's narrative or digression is essential), which can't be easy with a language like Russian whose structure is quite different from English.
It's largely an homage to Byron, but also a commentary on the state of Russian literature. It is Very Russian - in short, very tragic and quite political.
Accessible yet complex in all types of ways, and just gorgeous. Definitely a keeper.
My next Russian Lit project is War and Peace, which my mother kindly bought me for Christmas. I've leafed through it and think I'm very much NOT in love with the translation, so if anyone has any better suggestions, I'm interested. Interestingly, my edition of Anna Karenina is a hardcover from 1947, and I really hated the translation of that too. I'm beginning to wonder if it's a Tolstoy thing.
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