La morale est dans la nature des choses.
Necker
I–VI
VII
The less we love a woman
the easier ’tis to be liked by her,
and thus more surely we undo her
[4] amid seductive toils.
Time was when cool debauch
was lauded as the art of love,
trumpeting everywhere about itself,
[8] and taking pleasure without loving.
But that grand pastime
is worthy of old sapajous
of our forefathers’ vaunted times;
[12] the fame of Lovelaces has faded
with the fame of red heels
and of majestic periwigs.
Who does not find it tedious to dissemble;
diversely to repeat the same;
try gravely to convince one
[4] of what all have been long convinced;
to hear the same objections,
annihilate the prejudices
which never had and hasn’t
[8] a little girl of thirteen years!
Who will not grow weary of threats,
entreaties, vows, feigned fear,
notes running to six pages,
[12] deceptions, gossiping, rings, tears,
surveillances of aunts, of mothers,
and onerous friendship of husbands!
IX
Exactly thus my Eugene thought.
In his first youth he had
been victim of tempestuous errings
[4] and of unbridled passions.
Spoiled by a habitude of life,
with one thing for a while enchanted,
disenchanted with another,
[8] irked slowly by desire,
irked, too, by volatile success,
harking, in hum and hush,
the everlasting mutter of his soul,
[12] smothering yawns with laughter:
this was the way he killed eight years,
having lost life’s best bloom.
With belles no longer did he fall in love,
but dangled after them just anyhow;
when they refused, he solaced in a twinkle;
[4] when they betrayed, was glad to rest.
He would seek them without intoxication,
while he left them without regret,
hardly remembering their love and spite.
[8] Exactly thus does an indifferent guest
drive up for evening whist:
sits down; then, once the game is over,
he drives off from the place,
[12] at home falls peacefully asleep,
and in the morning does not know himself
where he will drive to in the evening.
XI
But on receiving Tanya’s missive,
Onegin was intensely moved:
the language of a maiden’s dreamings
[4] in him roused up thoughts in a swarm;
and he recalled winsome Tatiana’s
both pallid hue and mournful air;
and in a dream, delicious, sinless,
[8] his soul became absorbed.
Maybe an ancient fervidness of feelings
possessed him for a minute;
but he did not wish to deceive
an innocent soul’s trustfulness.
Now we’ll flit over to the garden
where Tatiana encountered him.
For a few seconds they were silent;
but up to her Onegin went
and quoth: “You wrote to me.
[4] Do not disown it. I have read
a trustful soul’s avowals,
an innocent love’s outpourings;
your candidness is dear to me,
[8] in me it has excited
emotions long grown silent.
But I don’t want to praise you—
I will repay you for it
[12] with an avowal likewise void of art;
hear my confession;
unto your judgment I commit myself.
XIII
“If life by the domestic circle
I’d want to limit;
if to be father, husband,
[4] a pleasant lot had ordered me;
if with the familistic picture
I were but for one moment captivated;
then, doubtlessly, save you alone
[8] no other bride I’d seek.
I’ll say without madrigal spangles:
my past ideal having found,
I’d doubtlessly have chosen you alone
[12] for mate of my sad days,
in gage of all that’s beautiful,
and been happy—as far as able!
“But I’m not made for bliss;
my soul is strange to it;
in vain are your perfections:
[4] I’m not at all worthy of them.
Believe me (conscience is thereof the pledge),
wedlock would be anguish to us.
However much I loved you, I,
[8] having grown used, would cease to love at once;
you would begin to weep; your tears
would fail to move my heart—
and would only enrage it.
[12] Judge, then, what roses
Hymen would lay in store for us—
and, possibly, for many days!
XV
“What in the world can be worse
than a family where the poor wife
broods over an unworthy husband
[4] and day and evening is alone;
where the dull husband, conscious of her merit
(yet cursing fate),
is always scowling, silent,
[8] cross, and coldly jealous?
Thus I. And it is this you sought
with a pure flaming soul
when with so much simplicity,
so much intelligence, to me you wrote?
[12] Can it be true that such a portion
is by stern fate assigned to you?
“For dreams and years there’s no return;
I shall not renovate my soul.
I love you with a brother’s love
[4] and maybe still more tenderly.
So listen to me without wrath:
a youthful maid more than once will exchange
for dreams light dreams;
[8] a sapling thus its leaves
changes with every spring.
By heaven thus ’tis evidently destined.
Again you will love; but …
[12] learn to control yourself;
not everyone as I will understand you;
to trouble inexperience leads.”
XVII
Thus Eugene preached.
Nought seeing through her tears,
scarcely breathing, without objections,
Tatiana listened to him.
[4] His arm to her he offered. Sadly
(as it is said: “mechanically”),
Tatiana leaned on it in silence,
[8] bending her dolent little head;
homeward [they went] around the kitchen garden;
together they arrived, and none
dreamt of reproving them for this:
[12] Country freedom possesses
its happy rights
just as does haughty Moscow.
You will agree, my reader,
that very nicely acted
our pal toward sad Tanya;
[4] not for the first time here did he reveal
a genuine nobility of soul,
though people’s ill will
spared nothing in him:
[8] his foes, his friends
(which is the same thing, maybe)
vilified him this way and that.
Foes upon earth has everyone,
[12] but God preserve us from our friends!
Ah me, those friends, those friends!
Not without cause have I recalled them.
XIX
What’s that? Oh, nothing. I am lulling
empty black dreams;
I only in parenthesis observe
[4] that there’s no despicable slander
spawned in a garret by a babbler
and by the rabble of the monde encouraged,
that there’s no such absurdity,
[8] nor an ignoble epigram,
that with a smile your friend
in a circle of decent people
without the slightest rancor or designs
[12] will not repeat a hundred times in error;
yet he professes to stand up for you:
he loves you so! … Oh, like a kinsman!
Hm, hm, gent reader,
is your entire kin well?
Allow me; you might want, perhaps,
[4] to learn now from me
what “kinsfolks” means exactly?
Well, here’s what kinsfolks are:
we are required to pet them,
[8] love them, esteem them cordially,
and, following popular custom,
come Christmas, visit them,
or else congratulate them postally,
[12] so that for the rest of the year
they will not think about us.
So grant them, God, long life!
XXI
As to the love of tender beauties,
’tis surer than friendship or kinship.
Over it even mid tumultuous storms
[4] rights you retain.
No doubt, so. But there’s fashion’s whirl,
there’s nature’s waywardness,
there’s the stream of the monde’s opinion—
[8] while the amiable sex is light as fluff.
Moreover, the opinions of her spouse
should by a virtuous wife
be always honored;
[12] your faithful mistress thus
may in a trice be bundled off:
with love jokes Satan.
Whom, then, to love? Whom to believe?
Who is the only one that won’t betray us?
Who measures all deeds, all speeches
[4] obligingly by our own foot rule?
Who does not sow slander about us?
Who coddles us with care?
To whom our vice is not so bad?
[8] Who never bores us?
Unlike a futile phantom-seeker
who wastes efforts in vain—
love your own self,
[12] my honorworthy reader.
A worthy object! Nothing
more amiable surely exists.
XXIII
What was the interview’s effect?
Alas, it is not hard to guess!
Love’s frenzied sufferings
[4] did not stop agitating
the youthful soul avid of sadness;
nay, more intensely with a joyless passion
poor Tatiana burns;
[8] sleep shuns her bed;
health, life’s bloom and its sweetness,
smile, virginal peace—
all, like an empty sound, has ceased to be,
[12] and darkening is dear Tanya’s youth:
thus a storm’s shadow clothes
the scarce-born day.
Alas, Tatiana fades away,
grows pale, is wasting, and is silent!
Nothing interests her
[4] or stirs her soul.
Shaking gravely their heads,
among themselves the neighbors whisper:
Time, time she married! …
[8] But that will do. I must make haste
to cheer up the imagination
with the picture of happy love.
Involuntarily, my dears,
[12] pity constrains me;
forgive me: I do love so much
my dear Tatiana!
XXV
From hour to hour more captivated
by the charms of young Olga,
Vladimir to delicious thralldom
[4] fully gave up his soul.
He’s ever with her. In her chamber
they sit together in the dark;
or in the garden, arm in arm,
[8] promenade at morningtide;
and what of it? With love intoxicated,
in the confusion of a tender shame,
he only dares sometimes,
[12] by Olga’s smile encouraged,
play with an unwound curl
or kiss the border of her dress.
Sometimes he reads to Olya
a moralistic novel—
in which the author has more knowledge
[4] of nature than Chateaubriand—
and meanwhile, two-three pages
(the empty divagations, never-haps,
for hearts of maidens dangerous)
[8] he leaves out with a blush.
Secluded far from everybody,
over the chessboard they,
their elbows on the table, sometimes
[12] sit deep in thought,
and Lenski with a pawn
takes in abstraction his own rook.
XXVII
When he drives home, at home he also
is with his Olga occupied,
the fugitive leaves of an album
[4] assiduously adorns for her :
now draws therein agrestic views,
a gravestone, the temple of Cypris,
or a dove on a lyre
[8] (using a pen and, slightly, colors);
anon on the leaves of remembrance,
beneath the signatures of others,
he leaves a tender verse—
[12] a silent monument of reverie,
an instant thought’s light trace,
still, after many years, the same.
You have, of course, seen more than once
the album of a provincial miss,
in which all her girl friends have scribbled
[4] from the end, the beginning, and all over.
Here, in defiance of orthography,
lines without meter, by tradition,
in sign of friendship faithfully are entered,
[8] diminished, lengthened.
On the first leaf you are confronted with:
Qu’ écrirez-vous sur ces tablettes?
signed: toute à vous Annette;
[12] and on the last one you will read:
“Whoever more than I loves you,
let him write farther than I do.”
XXIX
Here you are sure to find
two hearts, a torch, and flowerets;
here you will read no doubt the vows
[4] of love “Unto the tomb slab”;
some military “poet”
here has dashed off a roguish rhyme.
In such an album, my friends,
[8] frankly, I too am glad to write,
at heart being convinced
that any zealous trash of mine
will merit an indulgent glance
[12] and that thereafter, with an unkind smile,
none will gravely examine
if I could babble wittily or not.
But you, odd volumes
out of the devils’ library,
the magnificent albums,
[4] the torment of modish rhymesters;
you, nimbly ornamented
by Tolstoy’s wonder-working brush,
or Baratïnski’s pen,
[8] let the Lord’s Ievin burn you!
Whenever a resplendent lady
offers me her in quarto,
a trembling and a waspishness possess me,
[12] and an epigram stirs
in the depth of my soul—
but madrigals you have to write for them!
XXXI
Not madrigals does Lenski write
in the album of young Olga;
his pen breathes love—
[4] it does not glitter frigidly with wit.
Whatever he notest whatever he hears
concerning Olga, this he writes about;
and full of vivid truth
[8] flow, riverlike, his elegies.
Thus you, inspired Yazïkov,
in the impulsions of your heart,
sing God knows whom,
[12] and the precious code of elegies
will represent for you someday
the entire story of your fate.
But soft! You hear? A critic stern
commands us to throw off
elegy’s wretched wreath;
[4] and to our brotherhood of rhymesters
cries : “Do stop whimpering
and croaking always the same thing,
regretting ‘the foregone, the past’;
[8] enough! Sing about something else!”
You’re right, and surely you’ll point out to us
the trumpet, mask, and dagger,
and a dead stock of thoughts
[12] bid us revive from everywhere.
Thus, friend? Nowise! Far from it!
“Write odes, gentlemen,
XXXIII
“as in the mighty years one wrote them,
as was in times of yore established.”
Nothing but solemn odes!
[4] Oh, come, friend; what’s the difference?
Recall what said the satirist!
Can the shrewd lyrist in “As Others See It”
be more endurable to you
[8] than our dejected rhymesters?—
“But in the elegy all is so null;
its empty aim is pitiful;
whilst the aim of the ode is lofty
[12] and noble.” Here I might
argue with you, but I keep still:
I do not want to set two ages by the ears.
A votary of fame and freedom,
in the excitement of his stormy thoughts,
Vladimir might indeed have written odes,
[4] only that Olga did not read them.
Have the larmoyant poets ever chanced
to read before the eyes of loved ones
their works? ’Tis said
[8] that in the world there are no higher rewards.
And, verily, blest is the modest lover
reading his daydreams
to the object of songs and love,
[12] a pleasantly languorous beauty!
Blest-although, maybe, she
by quite another matter is diverted.
XXXV
But I the products of my reveries
and of harmonious device
read only to an old nurse,
[4] companion of my youth;
or after a dull dinner,
the neighbor who has strayed my way
catching abruptly by a coat skirt,
[8] I choke him in a corner with a tragedy,
or else (but that’s apart from jokes),
by yearnings and by rhymes oppressed,
roaming along my lake,
[12] I scare a flock of wild ducks:
on harking to the chant of sweet-toned strophes,
they fly off from the banks.
XXXVII
But what about Onegin? By the way, brothers!
I beg your patience:
his daily occupations
[4] in detail I’ll describe to you.
Onegin anchoretically lived;
he rose in summer between six and seven
and, lightly clad, proceeded
[8] to the river that ran below the hill;
the songster of Gulnare imitating,
across this Hellespont he swam,
then drank his coffee,
[12] flipping through some worthless review,
and dressed.
XXXVIII
Rambles, reading, sound sleep,
the sylvan shade, the purl of streams,
sometimes a white-skinned, dark-eyed girl’s
[4] young and fresh kiss,
a horse of mettle, bridle-true,
a rather fancy dinner,
a bottle of bright wine,
[8] seclusion, quiet—
this was Onegin’s saintly life;
and he unconsciously to it
surrendered, the fair summer days
[12] in carefree mollitude not counting,
oblivious of both town and friends
and of the boredom of festive devices.
XL
But our Northern summer
is a caricature of Southern winters;
it will glance by and vanish: this is known,
[4] though to admit it we don’t wish.
The sky already breathed of autumn,
the sun already shone more seldom,
the day was growing shorter,
[8] the woods’ mysterious canopy
with a sad murmur bared itself,
mist settled on the fields,
the caravan of cronking geese
[12] was tending southward; there drew near
a rather tedious period;
November stood already at the door.
Dawn rises in cold murk;
stilled in the grainfields is the noise of labors;
with his hungry female,
[4] the wolf comes out upon the road;
the road horse, upon sensing him,
snorts, and the wary traveler
sweeps uphill at top speed;
[8] the herdsman at sunrise
no longer drives the cows out of the shippon,
and at the hour of midday in a circle
his horn does not call them together;
[12] in her small hut singing, the maiden23
spins and, the friend of winter nights,
in front of her the splintlight crackles.
XLII
And there the frosts already crackle
and silver midst the fields
(the reader now expects the rhyme “froze-rose”—
[4] here you are, take it quick!).
Neater than modish parquetry,
the ice-clad river shines.
The gladsome crew of boys24
[8] cut with their skates resoundingly the ice;
a heavy goose with red feet,
planning to swim upon the bosom of the waters,
steps carefully onto the ice,
[12] slidders, and falls. The gay
first snow flicks, swirls,
falling in stars upon the bank.
What do then in the backwoods at this season?
Promenade? The country in that season
is an involuntary eyesore
[4] in its unbroken nakedness.
Go galloping in the harsh prairie?
But with a blunted shoe the steed
catching the treacherous ice,
[8] is likely any moment to come down.
Stay under your desolate roof,
read; here is Pradt, here’s Waiter Scott!
Don’t want to? Verify expenses,
[12] grumble or drink, and the long evening
somehow will pass; and next day the same thing,
and famously you’ll spend the winter.
XLIV
Onegin like a regular Childe Harold
lapsed into pensive indolence:
right after sleep he takes a bath with ice,
[4] and then, all day at home,
alone, absorbed in calculations,
armed with a blunt cue,
using two balls, at billiards
[8] ever since morning plays.
The country evening comes:
billiards is left, the cue’s forgot.
Before the fireplace the table is laid;
[12] Eugene waits; here Lenski is arriving,
borne by a troika of roan horses;
quick, let’s have dinner!
Of Veuve Clicquot or of Moët
the blesséd wine
in a befrosted bottle for the poet
[4] is brought at once upon the table.
It sparkles Hippocrenelike;25
with its briskness and froth
(a simile of this and that)
[8] it used to captivate me: for its sake
my last poor lepton I was wont
to give away—remember, friends?
Its magic stream
[12] no dearth of foolishness engendered,
but also what a lot of jokes, and verse,
and arguments, and merry dreams!
XLVI
But it betrays with noisy froth
my stomach,
and I sedate Bordeaux
[4] have actually now preferred to it.
For Ay I’m no longer fit,
Ay is like a mistress
glittering, volatile, vivacious,
[8] and wayward, and shallow.
But you, Bordeaux, are like a friend
who is, in grief and in calamity,
at all times, everywhere, a comrade,
[12] ready to render us a service
or share our quiet leisure.
Long live Bordeaux, our friend!
The fire is out; barely with ashes
is filmed the golden coal;
in a barely distinguishable stream
[4] weaves vapor, and with warmth
scarce breathes the grate. The smoke from pipes
goes up the chimney. The bright goblet
amid the table fizzes yet.
[8] The evening murk comes on
(I’m fond of friendly prate
and of a friendly bowl of wine
at that time which is called
[12] time between wolf and dog—
though why, I do not see).
Now the two friends converse.
XLVIII
“Well, how are the fair neighbors? How’s Tatiana?
How’s your spry Olga?”
“Pour me half a glass more ….
[4] That’ll do, dear chap …. The entire family
is well; they send you salutations.…
Ah, my dear chap, how beautiful have grown
Olga’s shoulders! What a bosom!
[8] What a soul! … Someday
let’s visit them; they will appreciate it;
or else, my friend, judge for yourself—
you dropped in twice, and after that
[12] you thenceforth did not even show your nose.
In fact-what a blockhead I am!—
you are invited there next week.”
“I?” “Yes, Tatiana’s name day
is Saturday. Olinka and the mother
bade me ask you, and there’s no reason
[4] you should not come in answer to their call.”
“But there will be a mass of people
and all kinds of such scum …”
“Oh, nobody, I am quite certain.
[8] Who might be there? The family only.
Let’s go, do me the favor.
Well?” “I consent.” “How nice you are!”
He emptied with these words
[12] his glass, a toast to the fair neighbor—
then waxed voluble again,
talking of Olga. Such is love!
L
Merry he was. A fortnight hence
the happy date was set,
and the nuptial bed’s mystery
[4] and love’s sweet crown
awaited his transports.
Hymen’s chores, woes,
yawnings’ chill train,
[8] he never dreamed of.
Whereas we, enemies of Hymen,
perceive in home life nothing but
a series of wearisome images,
[12] a novel in the genre of Lafontaine.26
My poor Lenski! He at heart
was for the said life born.
He was loved-or at least
he thought so-and was happy.
Blest hundredfold who is to faith devoted;
[4] who, having curbed cold intellect,
in the heart’s mollitude reposes
as, bedded for the night, a drunken traveler,
or (more tenderly) as a butterfly
[8] absorbed in a spring flower;
but pitiful is he who foresees all,
who’s never dizzy,
who all movements, all words
[12] in their translation hates,
whose heart experience has chilled
and has forbidden to be lost in dreams!