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

But on receiving Tanya’s missive,

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;

your candidness appeals to me,

8 in me it has excited

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

of all that’s beautiful, and would have been

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;

where the dull husband,

knowing her worth (yet cursing fate),

is always sullen, silent, cross,

8 and coldly jealous?

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.

By heaven thus ’tis evidently destined.

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:

12 its happy rights

has country freedom

as well as haughty Moscow has.

XVIII

You will agree, my reader,

that very nicely did our pal

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:

8 his foes, his friends

(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 encouraged,

that there’s no such absurdity,

8 nor vulgar epigram,

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,

8 esteem them cordially,

and, following popular custom,

come Christmas, visit them, or else

congratulate them postally,

12 so that for the remainder of the year

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

4 rights over it.

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 is the only one that won’t betray us?

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?

8 Who never bores us?

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

4 did not stop agitating

the youthful soul avid of sadness;

nay, poor Tatiana more intensely

with joyless passion burns;

8 sleep shuns her bed;

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

4 or moves her soul.

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

my dear Tatiana!

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

(empty chimeras, fables,

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 —

12 mute monument of reverie,

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

two hearts, a torch, and flowerets;

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,

8 let the Lord’s levin burn you!

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

12 of elegies

will represent for you someday

the entire story of your fate.

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

12 bid us revive.

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?

Recall what said the satirist!

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