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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Eugene Onegin in English.

In case you missed it, 'Eugene Onegin', the great Russian novel in verse by Alexander Pushkin, is now available in audio book format. Stephen Fry (the voice of Harry Potter) reads it in James Falen's translation (1995). 

To download the full audio book go to Fry Reads Onegin.

Here is sonnet (stanza) 6 from Chapter 1 of 'Eugene Onegin':

6.

The Latin vogue today is waning, 

And yet I'll say on his behalf, 

He had sufficient Latin training 

To gloss a common epigraph, 

Cite Juvenal in conversation, 

Put vale in a salutation; 

And he recalled, at least in part, 

A line or two of Virgil's art. 

He lacked, it's true, all predilection 

For rooting in the ancient dust 

Of history's annals full of must, 

But knew by heart a fine collection 

Of anecdotes of ages past: 

From Romulus to Tuesday last. 

VI 

Латынь из моды вышла ныне: 

Так, если правду вам сказать, 

Он знал довольно по-латыне, 

Чтоб эпиграфы разбирать, 

Потолковать об Ювенале, 

В конце письма поставить vale, 

Да помнил, хоть не без греха, 

Из Энеиды два стиха. 

Он рыться не имел охоты

В хронологической пыли

Бытописания земли: 

Но дней минувших анекдоты

От Ромула до наших дней

Хранил он в памяти своей.