Some thoughts on Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin Stanza 

                                                                      

On Sunday I spent the afternoon at Bard on the Beach, listening to Shakespeare’s blank verse in iambic pentameter; that evening I listened to two versions of  Eugene Onegin(EO) with Pushkin’s complex rhymes in iambic tetrameter.

The Comedy of Errors sounded like a very fast conversation with occasional bouts of rapid wordplay, with a couplet to end a speech, a scene, or to make a joke—like a cymbal crash after a comedian’s joke. I did not detect any strong sense of meter in the blank verse; it sounded much like prose.

Shakespeare’s conversational blank verse contrasted strongly with my rendition of a poem I used to read to my kids at bedtime, The Cremation of Sam McGee.  The rhyme scheme is AABB CCDD for about twenty stanzas, and each line has an internal rhyme;

“On a Christmas day we were mushing our way over the Dawson Trail.

Talk of you cold, through the parka’s fold it stabbed like a driven nail!”

This rhyme scheme moved the tale along at a rhythmic entertaining pace, and when I first read EO that was the model or pattern I fitted to it.

The rhythm and rhymes of EO kept the story light for me until, finally, Tatyana’s letter broke the spell and I felt a sense of drama and passion.

The Stephen Fry reading of Falen’s translation is in my Sam McGee vein. It is theatrical entertainment. His melodious voice, with its rich RP British accent, is delivered with rather wide intonation, an attention-getting trick, something like a mother talking to her baby, or a little girl to her kitten. Fry maintains the rhythm and stresses the rhymes. These rhymes were like sweets at the end of each line—a bit rich and distracting from the continuity. Even Pushkin pokes fun at this in 4.42;

“(If you’re expecting ‘a rose’ to rhyme with ‘froze,

there!—take it reader, quick!)”       (морозы – розы)

The other reading, in Russian, is by Innokenty Smoktunovsky. He makes the poem sound like blank verse. His reading is relaxed and conversational—a tête-à-tête voice, rather than Fry’s hold-an-audience voice. It is more engaging to listen to Smoktunovsky’s confidential, sometimes even wistful, tone. There are many pauses and the rhymes are unstressed. Nor is there any noticeable rhythm. It is a soothing, intimate voice, speaking directly to me.

This is the voice, pace and style that now plays in my own head as I read in silence.