Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Onegin has attracted many gifted translators, and there are several versions now available that give good approximations of Pushkin’s verse. A secondhand copy of one of these, by Charles Johnson, published in 1977, fell into the hands of a polyglot Indian postgrad at Stanford around 1982, who was charmed and entranced by a whole novel in fourteen-line stanzas with alternating masculine and feminine rhymes in ababccddeffegg order and frequent use of enjambment. Vikram Seth decided to make this form his own. He composed a story of his own life in the same regular form. The Golden Gate—“The Great California Novel” according to Gore Vidal—set Seth on the path to literary glory. Fifteen years later, The Golden Gate in its turn fell into the hands of an Israeli scholar, Maya Arad, who was entranced by the stanza form relayed to her by Seth from Charles Johnson’s version of Pushkin, whose Yevgeny Onegin she then read in the original. She appropriated the form for her own novel in verse, Another Place, a Foreign City, published to great acclaim in Hebrew in 2003. Here is one of Arad’s 355 stanzas translated into English by Adriana Jacobs. Though the rhymes have gone, old Onegin’s zest for St. Petersburg partying remains intact in twenty-first-century Tel Aviv:

Faster! Faster! No dawdling! Eat up!
Where will we go this time?
Who knows! The opera? The cinema?
The theater? Or a restaurant?
The city’s riches seem endless
Until it loses consciousness.
Faster—draining every minute—
Until the hour hand strikes midnight.
Sleep? Too bad! We’re still running
On full and the night is still young.
Let’s go party! Let’s find a club!
The night is tender and inviting.
December’s here, can you believe?
It feels like spring in Tel Aviv!

If the formal constraints of Eugene Onegin can be used to tell stories of America and Israel, why can they not be used to equal poetic effect to tell the very story that Pushkin told? Nabokov claims this is “mathematically impossible.” Mathematics has nothing to do with it. What he meant was that he wasn’t going to try.

Gilbert Adair was faced with a challenge of no lesser “mathematical impossibility” when he set out to translate Georges Perec’s La Disparition, a novel written exclusively with French words and expressions that do not contain the letter e. Writing without the letter e is hard to do for more than a short paragraph because we are simply not accustomed to conceptualizing words in terms of the letters by which they are set down in writing. It takes time and effort to learn the trick—but once you have taught yourself to do it, you can say as much as Perec learned to say in French. And more! Adair decorated his translation, called A Void, with many quips and interpolations of his own, and replaced Perec’s e-less parodies of famous French poems with e-less versions of well-known English-language verse:

“Sybil,” said I, “thing of loathing—Sybil, fury in bird’s clothing!
By God’s radiant kingdom soothing all man’s purgatorial pain,
Inform this soul laid low with sorrow if upon a distant morrow
It shall find that symbol for—oh for its too long unjoin’d chain—
Find that pictographic symbol, missing from its unjoin’d chain”
Quoth that Black Bird, “Not Again.”
And my Black Bird, still not quitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On that pallid bust—still flitting through my dolorous domain;
But it cannot stop from gazing for it truly finds amazing
That, by artful paraphrasing, I such rhyming can sustain—
Notwithstanding my lost symbol I such rhyming still sustain—
Though I shan’t try it again!