Владимир Набоков - Комментарии к «Евгению Онегину» Александра Пушкина

   My friends, you're sorry for the poet:
   in the bloom of glad hopes,
   not having yet fulfilled them for the world,
 4 scarce out of infant clothes,
   withered! Where is the ardent stir,
   the noble aspiration
   of young emotions and young thoughts,
 8 exalted, tender, bold?
   Where are love's turbulent desires,
   the thirst for knowledges and work,
   the dread of vice and shame,
12 and you, fond musings,
   you, [token] of unearthly life,
   you, dreams of sacred poetry!

   Perhaps, for the world's good
   or, at the least, for glory he was born;
   his silenced lyre might have aroused
 4 a resonant, uninterrupted ringing
   throughout the ages. There awaited
   the poet, on the stairway of the world,
   perhaps, a lofty stair.
 8 His martyred shade has carried
   away with him, perhaps,
   a sacred mystery, and for us
   dead is a life-creating voice,
12 and to his shade beyond the tomb's confines
   will not rush up the hymn of races,
   the blessing of the ages.

   And then again: perhaps,
   an ordinary lot awaited
   the poet. Years of youth would have elapsed:
 4 in him the soul's fire would have cooled.
   He would have changed in many ways,
   have parted with the Muses, married,
   up in the country, happy and cornute,
 8 have worn a quilted dressing gown;
   learned life in its reality,
   at forty, had the gout,
   drunk, eaten, moped, got fat, decayed,
12 and in his bed, at last,
   died in the midst of children,
   weepy females, and medicos.

   But, reader, be it as it may,
   alas, the young lover, the poet,
   the pensive dreamer, has been killed
 4 by a friend's hand!
   There is a spot: left of the village
   where inspiration's nursling dwelt,
   two pine trees grow, united at the roots;
 8 beneath them have meandered streamlets
   of the neighboring valley's brook.
   'Tis there the plowman likes to rest
   and women reapers come to dip
12 their ringing pitchers in the waves;
   there, by the brook, in the dense shade
   a simple monument is set.

   Beneath it (as begins to drip
   spring rain upon the herb of fields)
   the herdsman, plaiting his pied shoe of bast,
 4 sings of the Volga fishermen;
   and the young townswoman who spends
   the summer in the country,
   when headlong on horseback, alone,
 8 she scours the fields,
   before it halts her steed,
   tightening the leathern rein;
   and, turning up the gauze veil of her hat,
12 she reads with skimming eyes
   the plain inscription — and a tear
   dims her soft eyes.

   And at a walk she rides in open champaign,
   sunk in a reverie;
   a long time, willy-nilly,
 4 her soul is full of Lenski's fate;
   and she reflects: “What has become of Olga?
   Did her heart suffer long?
   Or did the season of her tears soon pass?
 8 And where's her sister now? And where, that shunner
   of people and the world,
   of modish belles the modish foe,
   where's that begloomed eccentric,
12 the slayer of the youthful poet?”
   In due time I shall give you an account
   in detail about everything.

   But not now. Though with all my heart
   I love my hero;
   though I'll return to him, of course;
 4 but now I am not in the mood for him.
   The years to austere prose incline,
   the years chase pranksome rhyme away,
   and I — with a sigh I confess —
 8 more indolently dangle after her.
   My pen has not its ancient disposition
   to mar with scribblings fleeting leaves;
   other chill dreams,
12 other stern cares,
   both in the social hum and in the still
   disturb my soul's sleep.

   I have learned the voice of other desires,
   I've come to know new sadness;
   I have no expectations for the first,
 4 and the old sadness I regret.
   Dreams, dreams! Where is your dulcitude?
   Where is (its stock rhyme) juventude?
   Can it be really true
 8 that withered, withered is at last its garland?
   Can it be true that really and indeed,
   without elegiac conceits,
   the springtime of my days is fled
12 (as I in jest kept saying hitherto),
   and has it truly no return?
   Can it be true that I'll be thirty soon?

   So! My noontide is come, and this
   I must, I see, admit.
   But, anyway, as friends let's part,
 4 O my light youth!
   My thanks for the delights,
   the melancholy, the dear torments,
   the hum, the storms, the feasts,
 8 for all, for all your gifts
   my thanks to you. In you
   amidst turmoils and in the stillness
   I have delighted... and in full.
12 Enough! With a clear soul
   I now set out on a new course
   to rest from my old life.

   Let me glance back. Farewell now, coverts
   where in the backwoods flowed my days,
   fulfilled with passions and with indolence
 4 and with the dreamings of a pensive soul.
   And you, young inspiration,
   stir my imagination,
   the slumber of the heart enliven,
 8 into my nook more often fly,
   let not a poet's soul grow cold,
   callous, crust-dry,
   and finally be turned to stone
12 in the World's deadening intoxication
   in that slough where with you
   I bathe, dear friends!40

   Chased by the vernal beams,
   down the surrounding hills the snows already
   have run in turbid streams
 4 onto the inundated fields.
   With a serene smile, nature
   greets through her sleep the morning of the year.
   Bluing, the heavens shine.
 8 The yet transparent woods
   as if with down are greening.
   The bee flies from her waxen cell
   after the tribute of the field.
12 The dales grow dry and varicolored.
   The herds are noisy, and the nightingale
   has sung already in the hush of nights.

   How sad your apparition is to me,
   spring, spring, season of love!
   What a dark stir there is
 4 in my soul, in my blood!
   With what oppressive tenderness
   I revel in the whiff
   of spring fanning my face
 8 in the lap of the rural stillness!
   Or is enjoyment strange to me,
   and all that gladdens, animates,
   all that exults and gleams,
12 casts spleen and languishment
   upon a soul long dead
   and all looks dark to it?

   Or gladdened not by the return
   of leaves that perished in the autumn,
   a bitter loss we recollect,
 4 harking to the new murmur of the woods;
   or with reanimated nature we
   compare in troubled thought
   the withering of our years,
 8 for which there is no renovation?
   Perhaps there comes into our thoughts,
   midst a poetical reverie,
   some other ancient spring,
12 which sets our heart aquiver
   with the dream of a distant clime,
   a marvelous night, a moon....