Falling out over Pushkin.

The Onegin Live site offers a free download of Pushkin's 'Eugene Onegin' read by Stephen Fry. But there is also a brief historical bibliography of over forty translations of the great Russian novel in verse. 

Much of it would be known to those who have an interest in Pushkin, but still I found this snippet thoroughly enjoyable. Nabokov and Edmund Wilson falling out over whose translation is best:

In 1963, Walter Arndt published a verse translation of Eugene Onegin preserving the rhyme schemes and metrical structure of Pushkin’s text. Vladimir Nabokov reviewed Arndt’s work in an essay entitled “On Translating Pushkin Pounding the Clavichord” that was published in The New York Review of Books. Nabokov furiously criticised Arndt’s translation; according to him, the attempt to preserve the original iambic tetrameter resulted in Arndt’s defacing Pushkin’s spirit and the literal meaning of the novel. Arndt replied with a letter “Goading the pony” that was followed by an article “The strange case of Pushkin and Nabokov” by Edmund Wilson, a critic who rose to Arndt’s defence and thus ruptured his close friendship with Nabokov.

In this clip Nabokov reads Pushkin's testament 'Exegi Monumentum' (1836) -

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