Verses and Versions: Three Centuries of Russian Poetry
Nabokov, touted as the only major modern author to write masterpieces in two languages, is also often called the best modern translator into English, though usually on the basis of his rendering of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, which is yet quite controversial (see Douglas R. Hofstadter’s Onegin translation, 1999, for elucidation). The contents of this collection based on a project Nabokov left unrealized go a long way to bolster those claims. Embracing a half-century of published translations of Russian poetry, it consists predominantly of satisfying English poems that, unlike Nabokov’s Onegin, observe the originals’ rhyme schemes, as the appearance of the Russian poems on facing pages verifies (one can see the rhymes, if not the metrics). Including several important eighteenth-century pioneers, 66 pages of translated Pushkin, 20 of Lermontov, 32 of Tyutchev, and indicative helpings of Baratinski, Fet, Nekrasov, Blok, and Hodasevich (whom Nabokov thought “the greatest Russian poet of Nabokov’s time”), consider this essential for translated Russian literature collections. --Ray Olson