Tearing off Pushkin's straitjacket

Writing before Russian culture was split between the Westernisers and the Slavophiles, Pushkin, who lived from 1799 until 1837, was a member of the minor nobility but sympathetic to the Decembrists.

It is hard to overstate the importance of Pushkin in Russian cultural history.

His work has been set to music by Tchaikovsky, Glinka, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninov and Stravinsky.

There are Pushkin statues and squares in a thousand Russian towns and cities and Pushkin stations on both the St Petersburg and Moscow metro systems.

Tsarskoye Selo, the town where he was educated, is now called Pushkin.

Soviet astronomers named a minor planet and a crater on Mercury after him.

The poet's birthday on June 6 is now celebrated as Pushkin Day.

Pushkin was a prolific author of poetry, drama, fiction and children's tales that have earned the status of world-class literature.

The Prisoner Of The Caucasus, The Bronze Horseman, Ruslan And Ludmila, Boris Godunov, Mozart And Salieri, The Queen Of Spades and The Captain's Daughter are among them. But his best-loved work undoubtedly remains the wonderful, genre-defying verse-novel Eugene Onegin.

On one level, it is high romance, the tragic tale of the dandy Onegin and the beautiful heroine Tatanya. But it is also a satire, a bagatelle and a comedy. It is a book about books, a study of provincial and metropolitan Russia after 1812, and it is full of cultural digressions and literary jokes. It's a sort of cross between Byron and Heine, a dazzling and witty form of elegant slapstick.

In order to write the book, Pushkin invented an original and complex sonnet form of his own, consisting of 14 lines in iambic tetrameter, which is four beats to a line. Each stanza is made up of three different quatrains and a final couplet, rhyming ABABCCDDEFFEGG. And, if that wasn't hard enough, he also introduced feminine rhymes - words of more than one syllable - at the end of lines one, three, five, six, nine and 12.

Not surprisingly, Eugene Onegin is famously difficult to translate into English. Russian grammar permits greater syntactical variation and many more possibilities for rhyme than English does. For readers used to the leisurely and spacious tradition of English pentameters, the four-beat line can seem unnecessarily abrupt or comical.

Pushkin translators who have tried to maintain the stanza form usually tend to rely too much on words ending in -ly, -ing and -tion for the feminine rhymes.

Vladimir Nabokov thought it impossible to attend to the poem's literal meanings and to its literary allusions at the same time as its melody and rhyme. To prove it, he published a four-volume translation in prose and then wrote On Translating Eugene Onegin in Pushkin stanzas.

For Penguin's new Eugene Onegin, translator Stanley Mitchell has preserved the Onegin stanza while keeping as close as possible to contemporary English idiom and to the colloquial feel of contemporary English poetry.

His use of half-rhymes, slant-rhymes, assonance and consonance is a real achievement, allowing him to wear the Pushkin stanza not as a straitjacket, but like a loosely fitting tuxedo.

Just occasionally, this freedom is pushed too far, as in Onegin/forsaken, astonishment/bewilderment, faith in/disputation, antiquity/bliny and pedestal/pistol. But Mitchell deploys some wonderfully inventive feminine rhymes. Carrot/garret, hotly/motley, random/in tandem, no/de trop and society/piety are some examples. He also deploys some outrageous ones, such as beret/very, cinders/windows and Moët/poet.

It is a triumph of metrical skill and easy wit, revealing Onegin as an ironic hero for our own times, his story "half-comic and half-melancholic/Ideal and down-to-earth bucolic/The careless fruit of leisure times/Of sleepless nights, light inspirations/Of immature and withered years/The intellect's cold observations/The heart's impressions marked in tears."

Andy Croft's own verse-novel in Pushkin stanzas, Ghost Writer, is published by Five Leaves.