Eugene Onegin
by Alexander Pushkin · first published 2008
24% recommend71% neutral6% critical
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…me wiser about how evil works. "Evil" is a fun word to throw around and lends itself to silly political slogans, but the real thing is no joke, is out there, and does not look like what you think. 3. _Eugene Onegin_, by Pushkin, as translated by Douglas Hofstadter (yes, that one). The man taught himself Russian by translating the Onegin to distract himself after his wife died. The foreword-essay changed how I regard…
on “Ask HN: Life Changing Books?” ↗…Seth's _The Golden Gate_ is a smart, funny and moving novel set in the Silicon Valley of the early 80ies. Astonishingly, it's written in verse, in the rhyme scheme of the classic Russian masterpiece _Eugene Onegin_ by Pushkin, which Seth read in translation and loved so much he decided to write a modern American novel in verse. His execution of this unorthodox idea is terrific.
on “Ask HN: Please name two of your most favorite books.” ↗…English translations of a piece of Hebrew Literature you like and comparing them. Then I remembered the linked article, which is a comparison of four different English translations of the verse novel Eugene Onegin, by Alexander Pushkin. The article was written by Douglas Hofstadter, a professor of cognitive science and comparative literature at Indiana University who has an essay collection called Metamagical…
on “Ask HN: I’m already fluent in English. How can I improve further?” ↗…be set aside when writing, nor is it necessary for the kinds of feelings that mathematics evokes to be “translated” into more familiar ones. (Edit: As an aside, Hofstadter's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin is similarly self-indulgent, and a joy to read. Of course one ought to read a couple of other translations first and keep them nearby, to become familiar with the content, but in terms of sheer wordplay…
on “Gödel, Escher, Bach is the most influential book in my life (2022)” ↗…together, elaborate puns seem to be set up over a course of 300 pages, etc. All in all, it is a book just simply of Hofstadter having fun. (I had the same impression of Hofstadter's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin — I've read at least three other translations; Hofstadter's may not be most literal but it's surely enjoyable and with the most outrageous rhymes: who else would rhyme "debts" with "Till his creditors…
on “Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach” ↗…Signal and The Noise by Nate Silver. It was an interesting read, but it felt a bit shallow in it's analysis. I was feeling the need for some fiction, so I picked up Vladimir Nabokov's translation of Eugene Onegin by Aleksandr Pushkin. Not sure what to think about it yet, but it's interesting reading Nabokov's analysis and seeing into his mindset a little. Sheds some light on his work as well.
on “Ask HN: What Books Are You Reading?” ↗Looks like James Falen manages to preserve the feel of orgiginal rythm. Also Kozlov(1998) is close. You can check others by yourself there: English Versions of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin: https://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/pml1/onegin/ It's hard to tell which one is the best, because I do not like the original ... too boring. I've tried it again today and it's boring again…
on “My Dad Published Lolita” ↗I'm mistaken about this. I confused it with the new translation of Pushkin's _Eugene_Onegin_, now by Stanley Mitchell (2008). My edition of _We_ was published in 1993.
on “1984: The masterpiece that killed George Orwell” ↗…theory): The underlying mathematics of the n-gram was first proposed by Markov (1913), who used what are now called Markov chains (bigrams and trigrams) to predict whether an upcoming letter in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin would be a vowel or a con- sonant. Markov classified 20,000 letters as V or C and computed the bigram and trigram probability that a given letter would be a vowel given the previous one or two letters.…
on “Using a Markov chain to generate readable nonsense with 20 lines of Python” ↗For a context: I am a native Russian speaker, I read "Eugene Onegin" in original and in Charles Johnston's translation, which was done more than 10 years after the article was written. I have not read Nabokov's or Arndt's translation, apart from the fragments in the article,…
on “The Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov (1965)” ↗Weird. I read the New York Review of Books articles about Eugene Onegin last week, because I'm reading it (in a different translation) at the moment. Douglas Hofstadter spends a chapter in Le Ton Beau De Marot, his book about translation, talking about and comparing various…
on “Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson’s Epic Literary Feud” ↗I have not read Nabokov's translation of Eugene Onegin, but this piece led me to wonder if he was an inspiration for Stanley Lombardo's translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey, which are stark departures from previous translations that eschew meter in favor…
on “What the feud between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson says about translation” ↗…the reader by making them identify with a horrible character, so... That's not the intent of the author. Nabokov has absolutely no moral or social points to make. I didn't realize this until I read Eugene Onegin, which I take as the genesis of Nabokov's general perspective. Onegin is funny and ironic while still being emotionally affecting. Nabokov is much more in the "art for art's sake" camp than most people…
on “My Dad Published Lolita” ↗> I would blame more the cold messed up soviet-era society for this Please read The Prince, The Karamazov Brothers, Eugene Onegin, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, or Dead Souls before writing this kind of grotesque sweeping statements.
on “A Soviet Prisoner's View on What's Important” ↗…the bitter feuds resulting from translations one of the foremost being Nabokov vs.Wilson (summary: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/books/review/feud-nabokov..., read Wilson's scathing review of the Eugene Onegin translation that's a textbook case of a hatchet job: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1965/07/15/the-strange-case-...). If you're interested in her, another good essay is by her other translator, Benjamin…
on “Will the Real Clarice Lispector Please Stand Up?” ↗