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Eugene Onegin

Page 15

by Alexander Pushkin


  How life had revelled, blood had burned;

  But now, as in a house forsaken,

  All it contains is dark and still,

  A home forever silent, chill,

  The windows shuttered, chalked and vacant,

  The mistress vanished from the place

  To God knows where, without a trace.

  33

  It’s pleasant with a verse to chasten

  A dunderheaded clown and foe,

  Pleasant to watch the fellow hasten

  With butting horns descending low

  To view his image in a mirror

  And turn from it in shame and horror;

  More pleasant, friends, if he howls out:

  ‘Oh look, that’s me there!’ like a lout;

  Still pleasanter with quiet persistence

  To plan a grave that lauds his name

  And at his pallid brow take aim

  From proper gentlemanly distance;

  It’s hardly pleasant, though, you’ll find

  To send him off to meet his kind.

  34

  What happens if your young companion

  Is slaughtered by your pistol shot

  For some presumptuous glance, opinion

  Or repartee worth not a jot,

  Insulting you while you were drinking,

  Or if, in fiery pique, not thinking,

  He calls you proudly to a duel,

  Tell me the feelings that would rule

  Your soul, when without motion lying

  In front of you upon the earth,

  Upon his brow the hue of death,

  He slowly stiffens, ossifying,

  When to your desperate appeal

  He is insensitive and still?

  35

  With sharpening contrition growing,

  Gripping the pistol in his hand,

  Onegin watched Vladimir’s going.

  ‘Well then, he’s dead, you understand,’

  Pronounced the neighbour. Dead! Onegin,

  Crushed by the utterance, walks off, quaking,

  To call his people.19 Straightaway,

  Zaretsky gently on the sleigh

  Settles the frozen corpse, escorting

  The dreadful treasure to its home.

  Sensing the corpse, the horses foam,

  Wetting the steel bit, chafing, snorting,

  But when they’re ready to depart,

  They fly as swiftly as a dart.

  36

  My friends, you’re sorry for the poet:

  Amid the bloom of hope, desire

  From which the world will never profit,

  And scarcely out of child’s attire,

  Gone! Where’s the ardent agitation,

  Where is the noble aspiration

  Of youthful feeling, youthful thought,

  Audacious, tender, highly wrought?

  Where, too, is love’s acclaimed impatience,

  The thirst for knowledge, thirst for work,

  The dread where vice and shame may lurk,

  And you, most cherished ruminations,

  You, phantoms of unearthly life,

  You, dreams with sacred verses rife!

  37

  Perhaps he was for good intended

  Or at the very least for fame;

  His silenced lyre might have extended

  Its sound through centuries to come

  With ringing music. There awaited

  Perhaps a special niche created

  For him at an exalted site.

  Perhaps his martyred shade in flight

  Carried away a holy secret,

  Remaining with him, and the joys

  Are lost of an uplifting voice,

  While from beyond the gravestone’s remit

  No hymn will rush to where he’s laid,

  Nor peoples come to bless his shade.

  [38]20

  39

  But then again the poet’s portion

  Might well have been quite commonplace.

  The years of youth give way to caution,

  Slowing the soul’s impetuous pace.

  Of poetry he might have wearied,

  And, parting from the Muses, married;

  A happy squire, with cuckold’s crown,

  Wearing a quilted dressing gown;

  He might have learned life’s true dimension,

  At forty he’d have had the gout,

  Drunk, eaten, moped, declined, got stout

  And died according to convention

  As children thronged and women cried

  And village quacks stood by his side.

  40

  But, reader, we shall never know it;

  Sufficient that upon a field

  A youthful lover, dreamer, poet

  Has by a friendly hand been killed!

  A leftward path from the location

  Where dwelt that child of inspiration

  Leads to two pines with roots entwined,

  Beneath which tiny currents wind

  Out of the valley’s brook they border.

  The ploughman rests beside their brink

  And female reapers come to sink

  Their ringing pitchers in the water;

  There, by the brook, in deepest shade,

  A simple monument is laid.21

  41

  A herdsman to the tomb retreating

  Sings (as the spring rain dots the grass)

  Of Volga fishermen, while plaiting

  His mottled sandals made of bast.

  A young townswoman who is spending

  Her summer in the country, wending

  On horseback through the fields alone,

  Rides headlong, comes upon the stone

  And halts her steed, before it pausing,

  As, tightening the leather leads,

  She lifts her veil of gauze and reads

  The plain inscription quickly, causing

  A tear to dim her tender eyes

  At Lensky’s premature demise.

  42

  And, at a trot, she rides through meadows,

  Sunk a long time in reverie,

  Her soul pervaded by the shadows

  Cast by the poet’s destiny;

  And wonders: ‘How did Olga suffer?22

  Was it for long she mourned her lover?

  Or did she only briefly rue?

  And where’s her sister now? Where, too,

  Is he, the fugitive, the hermit,

  Of modish belles the modish foe,

  Where did that gloomy oddball go,

  The slayer of the youthful poet?’

  I promise in due time I’ll bring

  A full account of everything,

  43

  But not today. Although my feeling

  For Eugene has not changed a bit,

  Though I’ll return to him, unfailing,

  Right now I am not up to it.

  To Spartan prose the years are turning,

  Coquettish rhyme the years are spurning;

  And I – I with a sigh confess –

  I’m running after her much less.

  My pen has lost its former pleasures

  Of daubing fleeting leaves, it seems,

  Today, quite different, chilling dreams;

  Quite different, unrelenting pressures,

  In stillness or in social noise,

  Disturb the sleep my soul enjoys.

  44

  I’ve come to know new aspirations,

  I’ve come to know new sadness, too;

  The former hold no expectations,

  And earlier sadness still I rue.

  Where are my dreams, the dreams I cherished?

  What rhyme now follows, if not ‘perished’?23

  And is the garland of my youth

  Withered at last, is this the truth?

  Is it the truth, all plain, unvarnished,

  Not in an elegiac cloak,

  That (hitherto said as a joke)

  The
springtime of my days has vanished,

  Can’t be brought back and that I’m near

  Already to my thirtieth year?24

  45

  The noontide of my life is starting,

  Which I must needs accept, I know;

  But oh, my light youth, if we’re parting,

  I want you as a friend to go!

  My thanks to you for the enjoyments,

  The sadness and the pleasant torments,

  The hubbub, storms, festivity,

  For all that you have given me;

  My thanks to you. I have delighted

  In you when times were turbulent,

  When times were calm… to full extent;

  Enough now! With a soul clear-sighted

  I set out on another quest

  And from my old life take a rest.

  46

  Let me glance back. Farewell, you arbours

  Where, in the backwoods, I recall

  Days filled with indolence and ardours

  And dreamings of a pensive soul.

  And you, my youthful inspiration.

  Keep stirring my imagination,

  My heart’s inertia vivify,

  More often to my corner fly.

  Let not a poet’s soul be frozen,

  Made rough and hard, reduced to bone

  And finally be turned to stone

  In that benumbing world he goes in,

  In that intoxicating slough

  Where, friends, we bathe together now.25

  CHAPTER VII

  Moscow, Russia’s favourite daughter,

  Where is your equal to be found?

  Dmitriyev

  One can’t but love one’s native Moscow.

  Baratynsky

  ‘Reviling Moscow! This is what

  You get from seeing the world!

  Where is it better, then?

  Where we are not.’

  Griboyedov1

  1

  Chased by the vernal beams, already

  Down the surrounding hills the snow

  Has run in turbid streams that eddy

  On to the flooded fields below;

  Nature, not yet from sleep returning,

  Greets with a smile the new year’s morning.

  The skies shine with a bluish sheen,

  Transparent still, the woods turn green,

  Lending the trees a downy cover,

  The bee flies from its waxen comb,

  Bringing the meadows’ tribute home.

  The dales dry out and colour over.

  Herds low, the hush of darkness brings

  The nightingale that newly sings.

  2

  How sad to me is spring’s arrival,

  Season of love, when all’s in bud!

  What languid tumult, what upheaval

  Disturb my soul, disturb my blood!

  With what a heavy, tender feeling

  I revel in the season, breathing

  The vernal wind that fans my face

  In some secluded, rural place!

  Or am I now estranged from pleasure,

  Does all that gladdens, animates,

  All that exults and radiates

  Cast boredom, languor in like measure

  Upon a soul long dead, does all

  Seem dark to it, funereal?

  3

  Or, cheerless, when the leaves of autumn

  Are resurrected by the spring,

  We recollect a bitter fortune,

  Hearing the woods’ new murmuring;

  Or we, in troubled contemplation

  Compare with nature’s animation

  The withered years of our estate,

  That nothing can resuscitate.

  Perhaps in thought we may recover,

  When caught in a poetic haze,

  Some other spring of older days

  That once more sets our hearts aquiver

  With dreams of some far distant clime,

  A wondrous night, a moon sublime…

  4

  It’s time: good idlers, I beseech you,

  Epicureans to the soul,

  You, fortune’s favourites, I entreat you, You,

  fledglings of the Lyovshin2 school,

  You rural Priams3 in your manors,

  You, ladies blessed with gentle manners,

  Spring calls you to the country soil,

  Season of warmth, of flowers and toil,

  Season of blissful walks and wandering,

  Betokening seductive nights.

  Quick, to the fields, the land invites

  Your coaches, ponderously trundling;

  By private horse or postal chaise,

  Forsake the city gates, make haste!

  5

  You, too, my reader, ever gracious,

  Into your foreign carriage climb,

  Leave now the noisy city spaces

  Where you caroused in winter time;

  On my capricious Muse depending,

  Let’s hear the oak wood’s sound ascending

  Above a river without name,

  Where my Eugene, the very same,

  Reclusive, idle and dejected,

  Spent winter only recently

  In Tanya’s close proximity,

  My dreaming maid whom he rejected;

  But now, no longer at his place,

  He’s left behind a dismal trace.

  6

  Midst hills in semi-circle lying,

  Let us go thither where a brook,

  By way of a green meadow plying,

  Runs through a linden, forest nook.

  The nightingale, through night’s long hours,

  Sings to the spring; the dog rose flowers,

  And there is heard the source’s sound –

  There, too, a tombstone can be found

  Beside two ancient pines umbrageous.

  The inscription tells the passer-by:

  ‘Vladimir Lensky doth here lie,

  Who died a young man and courageous,

  Aged such and such, in such a year.

  Young poet, rest and slumber here.’

  7

  Upon a pine branch, low inclining,

  Time was, there hung a secret wreath,

  Rocked by the breeze of early morning

  Over that humble urn beneath.

  Time was, two girls in evening leisure

  Would come to mourn this doleful treasure,

  And, on the grave, in moonlight glow,

  Embracing, they would weep… but now

  The monument’s forgot by people.

  The trail to it is overgrown,

  The wreath upon the bough is gone.

  Alone, beside it, grey and feeble,

  The shepherd sings still as before,

  Plaiting his wretched shoes of yore.

  [8,9]

  10

  My poor, poor Lensky! Pining, aching,

  Not long did his beloved weep,

  Soon was the youthful bride forsaking

  A grief that went not very deep.

  Another captured her attention,

  Another’s flattering intervention

  Restored the sufferer to calm,

  A lancer wooed with practised charm,

  And, by this lancer overpowered,

  Already at the altar she

  Stands with becoming modesty

  Beneath the bridal crown, head lowered,

  And, as her fiery eyes she dips,

  A smile alights upon her lips.

  11

  Alas, poor Lensky! In the kingdom

  Of distant, dark eternity,

  Was he perturbed by vows reneged on,

  Reports of infidelity,

  Or, on the Lethe, lulled to slumber,

  Where, blessedly, no thoughts encumber,

  The poet is no more perturbed,

  The earth is closed and no more heard?

  Just so! An earth that will ignore us

  Awaits us all beyond the gra
ve.

  The voice of lover, friend or knave

  Breaks off. Alone, the angry chorus

  Of heirs to the estate is raised,

  Disputing in indecent haste.

  12

  Soon Olya’s voice no more resounded

  Inside her old environment,

  The lancer, as his lot demanded,

  Must take her to his regiment.

  With tears of bitter sorrow flowing,

  The mother at her daughter’s going

  Seemed almost ready now to die,

  But Tanya simply could not cry,

  Only a deathly pallor covered

  The maiden’s melancholy face.

  When all came out to view the chaise

  And, bustling, said goodbye and hovered,

  Still holding back the newly wed,

  Tatiana wished the pair God speed.

  13

  And after them, outside the manor,

  Long did she gaze as through a mist…

  Alone, alone now is Tatiana!

  Alas, her sister, whom she missed,

  Companion of so many seasons,

  Her youthful little dove now hastens

  To somewhere far off, borne by fate,

  From her for ever separate;

  And, like a shade, she wanders, goalless,

  Glances into the garden bare…

  She finds no comforts anywhere

  Nor anything to give her solace

  For all the tears she has suppressed,

  And torn asunder is her breast.

  14

  And in her cruel isolation

  She feels more strongly passion’s sway,

  Her heart with greater perturbation

  Speaks of Onegin far away.

  She will not see him, maybe never,

  She should abhor in him for ever

  The slayer of her brother. Woe,

  The poet’s dead… already, though,

  He is forgot, his bride has given

  Herself already to be wed,

  The poet’s memory has fled

  As smoke across an azure heaven,

  There are two hearts yet, I believe,

  That grieve for him… but wherefore grieve?

 

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