![]() ![]() ![]() This edition belatedly fulfills this wish, with Nabokov’s English presented alongside the original in Cyrillic, accompanied by a transliteration the eye can easily skip between the languages. But his publishers found the cost to be prohibitive. He had hoped for his translation to be faced line for line with the Russian original and a transliteration, with stress marked in all words of more than one syllable. Pushkins incomparable poem has at its center a young Russian dandy much like Pushkin in his attitudes and habits. ![]() His wife Véra asked him “Why don’t you translate it yourself?” He soon realized there was no viable alternative. Aware that it was “the backbone of the study of Russian literature”, he read the existing translations in disgust and despair, finding himself obliged to revise every line. Nabokov began to think about translating Eugene Onegin as soon as he settled in Ithaca at the end of the summer of 1948 and started preparing for his first year of teaching Russian literature students at Cornell. He once predicted: “I shall be remembered for Lolita and my work on Eugene Onegin”. Far surpassing his other translating was the effort he expended on Pushkin. Vladimir Nabokov was not only a great writer but also an astonishing translator. ![]()
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