Pushkin

A few weeks ago I was wondering if The Woman in White had been the best book I'd never read. It wasn't, in the event, but Eugene Onegin could easily have been.

I avoided it for a few months, leaving it at the bottom of the pile, afraid of poetry in translation and the very idea of a novel written in sonnets. But things can benefit from low expectations.

Poetry in translation is a hard enough thing to do in the first place without having to reproduce a demanding rhyme scheme. However good Jules Laforgue is in French, it didn't happen for me in English. But whether it is Pushkin or the ingenious work of Stanley Mitchell, Eugene Onegin turns out to be a wonderful thing. If at first the rhyming seems a bit unnatural, well, insistent rhyme is unnatural and jars when it bosses the poem about but it can be useful when unobtrusive or impressive when it's done as well as it is here. The blurb says that the translation 'captures the cadences and lightness of the original poem' and it is that lightness in what is not going to be a 'light' story that comes across.

Not all canonical classics do it for me. I've tried a few times with Jane Austen but don't get it. But I'm gladder to have found Pushkin after all these years than I can say and he looks like being a project for further investigation in the new year.