La morale est dans la nature des choses.
VII
The less we love a woman
the easier 'tis to be liked by her,
and thus more surely we undo her
4 among bewitching toils.
Time was when cool debauch
was lauded as the art of love,
trumpeting everywhere about itself,
8 taking its pleasure without loving.
But that grand game
is worthy of old sapajous
of our forefathers' vaunted times;
12 the fame of Lovelaces has faded
with the fame of red heels
and of majestic periwigs.
VIII
Who does not find it tedious to dissemble;
diversely to repeat the same;
4 of what all have been long convinced;
to hear the same objections,
annihilate the prejudices
which never had and hasn't
8 a little girl of thirteen years!
Who will not grow weary of threats,
entreaties, vows, feigned fear,
notes running to six pages,
12 betrayals, gossiping, rings, tears,
surveillances of aunts, of mothers,
and the onerous friendship of husbands!
IX
Exactly thus my Eugene thought.
In his first youth
he had been victim of tempestuous errings
4 and of unbridled passions.
Spoiled by a habitude of life,
with one thing for a while
enchanted, disenchanted with another,
8 irked slowly by desire,
hearkening in the hubbub and the hush
to the eternal mutter of his soul,
12 smothering yawns with laughter:
this was the way he killed eight years,
having lost life's best bloom.
X
With belles no longer did he fall in love,
but dangled after them just anyhow;
when they refused, he solaced in a twinkle;
4 when they betrayed, was glad to rest.
He sought them without rapture,
while he left them without regret,
hardly remembering their love and spite.
8 Exactly thus does an indifferent guest
drive up for evening whist:
sits down; then, when the game is over,
he drives off from the place,
12 at home falls peacefully asleep,
and in the morning does not know himself
where he will drive to in the evening.
XI
Onegin was profoundly touched:
the language of a maiden's daydreams
4 stirred up in him a swarm of thoughts;
and he recalled winsome Tatiana's
pale color, mournful air;
and in a sweet and sinless dream
8 his soul became absorbed.
Perhaps an ancient glow of feelings
possessed him for a minute;
but he did not wish to deceive
12 an innocent soul's trustfulness.
Now we'll flit over to the garden where Tatiana
encountered him.
XII
For a few seconds they were silent;
Onegin then went up to her
and quoth: “You wrote to me.
4 Do not deny it. I have read
a trustful soul's avowals,
an innocent love's outpourings;
emotions long grown silent.
But I don't want to praise you —
I will repay you for it
12 with an avowal likewise void of art;
hear my confession;
unto your judgment I submit.
XIII
“If I by the domestic circle
had wanted to bound life;
if to be father, husband,
4 a pleasant lot had ordered me;
if with the familistic picture
I were but for one moment captivated;
then, doubtlessly, save you alone
8 no other bride I'd seek.
I'll say without madrigal spangles:
my past ideal having found,
I'd doubtlessly have chosen you alone
12 for mate of my sad days, in gage
happy — in so far as I could!
XIV
“But I'm not made for bliss;
my soul is strange to it;
in vain are your perfections:
4 I'm not at all worthy of them.
Believe me (conscience is thereof the pledge),
wedlock to us would be a torment.
However much I loved you,
8 having grown used, I'd cease to love at once;
you would begin to weep; your tears
would fail to touch my heart —
they merely would exasperate it.
12 Judge, then, what roses
Hymen would lay in store for us —
and, possibly, for many days!
XV
“What in the world can be
worse than a family where the poor wife frets
over an undeserving husband
4 and day and evening is alone;
knowing her worth (yet cursing fate),
is always sullen, silent, cross,
Thus I. And is it this you sought
with pure flaming soul when
with such simplicity,
12 with such intelligence, to me you wrote?
Can it be true that such a portion
is by stern fate assigned to you?
XVI
“For dreams and years there's no return;
I shall not renovate my soul.
I love you with a brother's love
4 and maybe still more tenderly.
So listen to me without wrath:
a youthful maid will more than once
for dreams exchange light dreams;
8 a sapling thus its leaves
changes with every spring.
Again you will love; but.
12 learn to control yourself;
not everyone as I will understand you;
to trouble inexperience leads.”
XVII
Thus Eugene preached.
Nought seeing through her tears,
scarce breathing, without protests,
4 Tatiana listened to him.
His arm to her he offered. Sadly
(as it is said: “mechanically”),
Tatiana leaned on it in silence,
8 bending her languid little head;
homeward [they] went around the kitchen garden;
together they arrived, and none
dreamt of reproving them for this:
has country freedom
as well as haughty Moscow has.
XVIII
You will agree, my reader,
act toward melancholy Tanya;
4 not for the first time here did he reveal
a real nobility of soul,
though people's ill will
spared nothing in him:
(which, maybe, are the same)
upbraided him this way and that.
Foes upon earth has everyone,
12 but God preserve us from our friends!
Ah me, those friends, those friends!
Not without cause have I recalled them.
XIX
What's that? Oh, nothing. I am lulling
empty black reveries;
I only in parenthesis observe
4 that there's no despicable slander
spawned in a garret by a babbler
and by the rabble of the monde
that there's no such absurdity,
that with a smile your friend
in a circle of decent people
without the slightest malice or design
12 will not repeat a hundred times in error;
yet he professes to stand up for you:
he loves you so!... Oh, like a kinsman!
XX
Hm, hm, gent reader,
are all your kindred well?
Allow me; you might want, perhaps,
4 to learn from me now what exactly
is meant by “kinsfolks”?
Well, here's what kinsfolks are:
we are required to pet them, love them,
and, following popular custom,
come Christmas, visit them, or else
congratulate them postally,
they will not think about us.
So grant them, God, long life!
XXI
As to the love of tender beauties,
'tis surer than friendship or kin:
even mid restless tempests you retain
No doubt, so. But one has to reckon
with fashion's whirl, with nature's waywardness,
with the stream of the monde's opinion —
8 while the sweet sex is light as fluff.
Moreover, the opinions of her husband
should by a virtuous wife
be always honored;
12 your faithful mistress thus
may in a trice be swept away:
with love jokes Satan.
XXII
Whom, then, to love? Whom to believe?
Who measures all deeds and all speeches
4 obligingly by our own foot rule?
Who does not sow slander about us?
Who coddles us with care?
To whom our vice is not so bad?
Efforts in vain not wasting
(as would a futile phantom-seeker),
love your own self,
12 my worthly honored reader.
A worthy object! Surely, nothing
more amiable exists.
XXIII
What was the consequence of the interview?
Alas, it is not hard to guess!
Love's frenzied sufferings
the youthful soul avid of sadness;
nay, poor Tatiana more intensely
with joyless passion burns;
health, life's bloom and its sweetness,
smile, virginal tranquillity —
all, like an empty sound, have ceased to be,
12 and gentle Tanya's youth is darkling:
thus a storm's shadow clothes
the scarce-born day.
XXIV
Alas, Tatiana fades away,
grows pale, is wasting, and is mute!
Nothing beguiles her
Shaking gravely their heads,
among themselves the neighbors whisper:
Time, time she married!...
8 But that will do. I must make haste
to cheer the imagination with the picture
of happy love.
I cannot help, my dears,
12 being constrained by pity;
forgive me: I do love so much
XXV
From hour to hour more captivated
by the attractions of young Olga,
Vladimir to delicious thralldom
4 fully gave up his soul.
He's ever with her. In her chamber
they sit together in the dark;
or in the garden, arm in arm,
8 they stroll at morningtide;
and what of it? With love intoxicated,
in the confusion of a tender shame,
he only dares sometimes,
12 by Olga's smile encouraged,
play with an unwound curl
or kiss the border of her dress.
XXVI
Sometimes he reads to Olya
a moralistic novel —
in which the author
4 knows nature better than Chateaubriand —
and, meanwhile, two-three pages
for hearts of maidens dangerous)
8 he blushingly leaves out.
Retiring far from everybody,
over the chessboard they,
leaning their elbows on the table,
12 at times sit deep in thought,
and Lenski in abstraction takes
with a pawn his own rook.
XXVII
When he drives home, at home he also
is with his Olga occupied,
the volatile leaves of an album
4 assiduously adorns for her:
now draws therein agrestic views,
a gravestone, the temple of Cypris,
or a dove on a lyre
8 (using a pen and, slightly, colors);
now on the pages of remembrance,
beneath the signatures of others,
he leaves a tender verse —
an instant thought's light trace,
still, after many years, the same.
XXVIII
You have, of course, seen more than once the album
of a provincial miss, by all her girl friends
scrawled over from the end,
4 from the beginning, and around.
Here, in defiance of orthography,
lines without meter, [passed on] by tradition,
in token of faithful friendship are entered,
8 diminished, lengthened.
On the first leaf you are confronted with:
Qu' écrirez-vous sur ces tablettes?
signed: toute à vous Annette;
12 and on the last one you will read:
“Whoever more than I loves you,
let him write farther than I do.”
XXIX
Here you are sure to find
here you will read no doubt
4 love's vows “Unto the tomb slab”;
some military poetaster
here has dashed off a roguish rhyme.
In such an album, to be frank, my friends,
8 I too am glad to write,
at heart being convinced
that any zealous trash of mine
will merit an indulgent glance
12 and that thereafter, with a wicked smile,
one will not solemnly examine
if I could babble wittily or not.
XXX
But you, odd volumes
from the bibliotheca of the devils,
the gorgeous albums,
4 the rack of fashionable rhymesters;
you, nimbly ornamented
by Tolstoy's wonder-working brush,
or Baratïnski's pen,
Whenever her in-quarto a resplendent lady
proffers to me,
a tremor and a waspishness possess me,
12 and at the bottom of my soul
there stirs an epigram —
but madrigals you have to write for them!
XXXI
Not madrigals does Lenski
write in the album of young Olga;
his pen breathes love —
4 it does not glitter frigidly with wit.
Whatever he notes, whatever he hears
concerning Olga, this he writes about;
and full of vivid truth
8 flow, riverlike, his elegies.
Thus you, inspired Yazïkov,
sing, in the surgings of your heart,
God knows whom, and the precious code
will represent for you someday
XXXII
But soft! You hear? A critic stern
commands us to throw off
the sorry wreath of elegies;
4 and to our brotherhood of rhymesters
cries: “Do stop whimpering
and croaking always the same thing,
regretting 'the foregone, the past';
8 enough! Sing about something else!” —
You're right, and surely you'll point out
to us the trumpet, mask, and dagger,
and everywhence a dead stock of ideas
Thus friend? — “Nowise!
Far from it! Write odes, gentlemen,
XXXIII
“as in a mighty age one wrote them,
as was in times of yore established.”
Nothing but solemn odes?
4 Oh, come, friend; what's this to the purpose?
Does the shrewd lyrist in “As Others See It”
seem more endurable to you
8 than our glum rhymesters? —
“But in the elegy all is so null;
its empty aim is pitiful;
whilst the aim of the ode is lofty
12 and noble.” Here I might
argue with you, but I keep still:
I do not want to make two ages quarrel.
XXXIV
A votary of fame and freedom,
in the excitement of his stormy thoughts,
Vladimir might have written odes,
4 only that Olga did not read them.
Have ever chanced larmoyant poets
to read their works before the eyes
of their beloved ones? It is said, no higher
8 rewards are in the world.
And, verily, blest is the modest lover
reading his daydreams to the object
12 a pleasantly languorous belle!
Blest — though perhaps by something
quite different she is diverted.
XXXV
But I the products of my fancies
and of harmonious device
read but to an old nurse,
or after a dull dinner, when a neighbor
strays in to see me — having caught
him by a coat skirt unexpectedly —
8 I choke him in a corner with a tragedy,
or else (but that's apart from jesting),
haunted by yearnings and by rhymes,
roaming along my lake,
12 I scare a flock of wild ducks; they, on heeding
the chant of sweet-toned strophes,
fly off the banks.
XXXVII
But what about Onegin? By the way,
his daily occupations in detail
4 I shall describe to you.
Onegin anchoretically lived;
he rose in summer between six and seven
and, lightly clad, proceeded to the river
8 that ran under the hillside. Imitating
the songster of Gulnare,
across this Hellespont he swam,
then drank his coffee, while he flipped
12 through some wretched review,
and dressed
XXXIX
Rambles, and reading, and sound sleep,
the sylvan shade, the purl of streams,
sometimes a white-skinned, dark-eyed girl's
a horse of mettle, bridle-true,
a rather fancy dinner,
a bottle of bright wine,
and he insensibly to it
surrendered, the fair summer days
12 in carefree mollitude not counting,
oblivious of both town and friends
and of the boredom of festive devices.
XL
But our Northern summer is a caricature
of Southern winters;
it will glance by and vanish: this is known,
4 though to admit it we don't wish.
The sky already breathed of autumn,
the sun already shone more seldom,
the day was growing shorter,
8 the woods' mysterious canopy
with a sad murmur bared itself,
mist settled on the fields,
the caravan of clamorous geese
12 was tending southward; there drew near
a rather tedious period;
November stood already at the door.
XLI
stilled in the grainfields is the noise of labors;
with his hungry female, the wolf
4 comes out upon the road;
the road horse, sensing him,
snorts, and the wary traveler
goes tearing uphill at top speed;
8 no longer does the herdsman drive at sunrise
the cows out of the shippon,
and at the hour of midday in a circle
his horn does not call them together;
12 in her small hut singing, the maiden
23
spins and, the friend of winter nights,
in front of her the splintlight crackles.
XLII
And now the frosts already crackle
and silver 'mid the fields
(the reader now expects the rhyme “froze-rose” —
Neater than modish parquetry,
the ice-clad river shines.
8 cut with their skates resoundingly the ice;
a heavy goose with red feet, planning
to swim upon the bosom of the waters,
steps carefully upon the ice,
12 slidders, and falls. The gay
first snow flicks, whirls,
falling in stars upon the bank.
XLIII
What can one do at this time in the wilds?
Walk? But the country at that time
is an involuntary eyesore
4 in its unbroken nakedness.
Go galloping in the harsh prairie?
But, catching with a blunted shoe
the treacherous ice, one's mount
8 is likely any moment to come down.
Stay under your desolate roof,
read; here is Pradt, here's Walter Scott!
Don't want to? Verify expenses,
12 grumble or drink, and the long evening
and famously you'll spend the winter.
XLIV
Onegin like a regular Childe Harold
lapsed into pensive indolence:
right after sleep he takes a bath with ice,
4 and then, at home all day,
alone, absorbed in calculations, armed
with a blunt cue,
using two balls,
8 ever since morn plays billiards.
The country evening comes; abandoned
are billiards, the cue is forgot.
Before the fireplace the table is laid;
12 Eugene waits; here comes Lenski,
borne by a troika of roan horses;
quick, let's have dinner!
XLV
Of Veuve Clicquot or of Moët
the blesséd wine
in a chilled bottle for the poet
4 is brought at once upon the table.
with its briskness and froth
(a simile of this and that)
8 it used to captivate me: for its sake
my last poor lepton I was wont
to give away — remember, friends?
Its magic stream engendered
12 no dearth of foolishness,
but also lots of jokes, and verses,
and arguments, and merry dreams!
XLVI
But with its noisy froth
it plays false to my stomach,
and nowadays sedate Bordeaux
4 already I've preferred to it.
For Ay I'm no longer fit,
Ay is like
a mistress, brilliant, volatile, vivacious,
8 and whimsical, and shallow.
But you, Bordeaux, are like a friend
who in grief and misfortune
12 ready to render us a service
or share our quiet leisure.
Long live Bordeaux, our friend!
XLVII
The fire is out; barely with ashes
is filmed the golden coal;
in a barely distinguishable stream
4 the vapor weaves, and the grate faintly
exhales some warmth. The smoke of pipes
goes up the chimney. The bright goblet
8 The evening gloam comes on
(I'm fond of friendly prate
and of a friendly bowl of wine
at that time which is called
though why, I do not see).
Now the two friends converse.
XLVIII
“Well, how are the fair neighbors? How's Tatiana?
”
“Pour me half a glass more....
4 That'll do, dear chap.... The entire family
is well; they send you salutations....
Ah, my dear chap, how beautiful the shoulders
8 Ah, what a bosom! What a soul!... Someday
let's visit them; they will appreciate it;
or else, my friend, judge for yourself —
you dropped in twice, and after that
In fact — well, what a dolt I am!
You are invited there next week.”
XLIX
“I?” “Yes, Tatiana's name day
is Saturday. Ólinka and the mother
4 you should not come in answer to their call.”
“But there will be a mass of people
and all kinds of such scum.”
“Oh, nobody, I am quite certain.
Let's go, do me the favor.
Well?” “I consent.” “How nice you are!”
And with these words he drained
12 his glass, a toast to the fair neighbor —
talking of Olga. Such is love!
L
Merry he was. A fortnight hence
the blissful date was set,
and the nuptial bed's mystery
his transports.
Hymen's cares, woes,
yawnings' chill train,
perceive in home life but a series
of tedious images,
12 a novel in the genre of Lafontaine.
26
O my poor Lenski! For the said
LI
He was loved — or at least
he thought so — and was happy.
Blest hundredfold is he who is devoted
4 to faith; who, having curbed cold intellect,
as, bedded for the night, a drunken traveler,
or (more tenderly) as a butterfly
8 absorbed in a spring flower;
but pitiful is he who foresees all,
who hates all movements and all words
12 in their interpretation,
whose heart is by experience
chilled and forbidden to get lost in dreams.