7. Vulgarisms and stale slang: «the bells in decollte creations», «moms», «twosomes», «highbrow», «his women», «I sang of feet I knew before, dear lady-feet», «dear heart, dear all» (Lenski in his last elegy to Olga), «Simonpure», «beau geste», «hard to meet» (for «unsociable»), «my uncle, decorous old prune» (for «my uncle has most honest principles»), the nurse telling Tatiana «Aye, don't holler», Olga «blended of peach and cream», Tatiana writing to Onegin «my knees were folding» and «you justly dealt with my advances» (Tatiana, Pushkin's Tatiana!). Here too belongs a special little curiosity. The minds of versionists seldom meet but a singular convergence of thai soil occurs in Eight: xxxviii. Pushkin shows Onegin moodily sitting by the fire and dropping into it «now a slipper, now his magazine». Elton, in 1Q37, vulgarly translated this as «... the News drops in the fire or else his shoes» and Mr. Arndt has the almost identical «... the News slipped in the fiere or his shoes».
8. Howlers and other glaring mistakes. The true howler is a joint product of ignorance and self-assurance. Here are a few of the many examples provided by Mr. Arndt. InSix: v Pushkin describes Zaretski (formerly a rake, now a placid landowner in the backwoods of northwest Russia). Zaretski several years earlier, during the Napoleonic wars, was taken prisoner by the French and had a pleasant time in Paris — so pleasant in fact that now, in 182021, he would not mind being captured again (if there were another war) «so as to drink on credit at Very's [a caferestaurant in Paris, originally on the Terrasse des Feuillants in the Jardin des Tuilenes] two or three bottles every morning». Mr. Arndt completely misses the point, assumes that Very is a Parisian restaurateur established in Russia (say in Pskov), not too far from Zaretski's country seat, and holdly renders Pushkin's lines as «... braving bondage (what bondage in 1821?), enraptured (with what?), he still gallops on his morning sprees to charge three bottles at Very's». Another howler occurs in his version of Two: xxxv where Pushkin has «the people yawning» on Trinity Day in church, but where Arndt has «... Trinity when the peasants tell their beads» (which they do not commonly do in Russia) «and nod at morning service» (which is not easy in the Greek-Orthodox standing position). In Three: in the meager fare Mrs. Larin offers to her guests («jams in little dishes are brought; upon a small table, oil-cloth'd [lexically, «waxed»] a jug of lingonberry water is set») becomes a Gargarndtuan feast with utensils for giants: «... bowls of preserves, then the habitual bilberry water lumbers on (?) in a great waxsealed [mix-up with the epithet used in the text for the small table] demi-john» [two or three gallons?]. In Three: ix Pushkin alludes to St. Preux («the lover of Julie Wolmar») but Arndt, who apparently has not read Rousseau's novel, confuses husband with lover: «Julie's adoring swain, Wolmar».
In Three: xxviii Pushkin's two learned ladies, one in a yellow shawl, as pedantic as a seminarian, and the other, a bonneted one, as grave as an academician (meaning member of the Academy of Sciences) are replaced in Arndt's version by a Buddhist priest («the saffron-muffled clerk in orders») and an English don («a mortar-boarded sage»), which, as boners go, is a kind of multiple fracture. Pushkin's hills which in the beginning of Chapter Five are «softly overspread with Winter's brilliant carpeting» become «mountain summits (in lowland Russia!) softly stretching 'neath Winter's scintillating shawl» (which produces an unexpected American-bosom image); the «sumptuous contact of yielding rugs» (One: xxxi) becomes the rather Freudian «voluptuous embrace of swelling carpets», and the «surgings» of a poet's «heart» (Four: xxxi) are gynandromorphosed into the «deep stirrings of [his] womb». There is no space to list all the glaring mistakes of this sort, and I shall mention only two more. In Six: xix Pushkin has listless Lenski, on the eve of his duel, «sit down at the clavichord and play but chords on it», a melancholy image which Arndt horribly transforms into: «the clavichord he would be pounding, with random chord set it resounding». And finally here is the bloomer in Arndt's version of the end of Three: xl where Pushkin speaks of a hare trembling as it suddenly sees from afar «a shotman in the bushes crouch» hut where Arndt changes the weapon and has the hare listen «as from afar with sudden rush an arrow falls into the brush». The source of this blunder will be explained in the next section.
9. Inadequate knowledge of Russian. This is a professional ailment among nonRussian translators from Russian into English. Anything a little too far removed from the kak-vy-pozhivaete-ya-pozhivayu-khorosho group becomes a pitfall, into which, rather than around which, dictionaries guide the groper; and when they are not consulted, then other disasters happen. In the abovementioned Three: XL passage, Mr. Arndt has evidently confused the word strelka, accusative of strelok (shooter, sportsman) with strelka (diminutive of strela, arrow). Sed'moy chas is not «past seven» (p. 149) but only past six. Podzhavshi ruki does not mean «arms akimbo» (p. 62) but «with snugly folded arms». Vishen'e is simply «cherries» (with which the girls pelt the eavesdropper in their song in Chapter Three) and not «cherry twigs» and «branches» with which Arndt makes them beat away the intruder. Pustynnyy sneg is «desolate snow», not «desert snow» (p. 122). V puhu is «covered with fluff» and not «a little dim» (p. 127). Obnovit'(Two: xxxiii) is not to «renovate» or «mend» but to «inaugurate». Vino in Two: xi is «liquor», not «wine». Svod in Four: xxi is not «freight», but «code». Hory (Seven: li) means the upper gallery of a public ballroom, and not «the involved rotations of rounds» — whatever that is.
10. Wobbly English. The phrase «next door» is used to mean «next room» (pp. 122 and 133). A skeleton impossibly «pouts» on p. 122. Lenski in the duel «closing his left eye starts to level» but Arndt (p. 132) makes him take aim with «his left eye blinking» like the corresponding tail light of a turning truck; soon after which (p. 157) «Dead lies our dim young bard and lover by friendly hand and weapon felled». And the amazon of Six: xli whom Pushkin pictures as halting her steed before Lenski's grave is hilariously made to «rein in her charging horse».
11. Padding. Plug words and rhymes are bound to occur in rhymed versions, but I have seldom seen them used with such consistency and in such profusion as here. A typical example of routine padding (for the sake of a bad rhyme) is the puffing up of the literal «she says: farewell pacific dales, and you, familiar hill tops» (Seven: xxviii) to become, in Arndt's version; «(she) whispers: Calm valleys where I sauntered, farewell; lone summits that I haunted». When in the same chapter Tatiana is described by Pushkin as avidly reading Onegin's books whereupon «a different world is revealed to her», this becomes with Arndt: «an eager passage (!) door on door (!) to worlds she never knew before». Here simple padding shades into the next category of mistranslation.
12. Otsebyatina. This convenient cant word consists of the words ot, meaning «from», and sebya, meaning «oneself», with a pejorative suffix, yatina, tagged on (its ya takes improper advantage of the genitive ending of the pronoun, coinciding with it and producing a strongly stressed bya sound which to a Russian's ear connotes juvenile disgust). Lexically translated, it can be rendered as «come-from-one-selfer» or «from one-selfity». It is employed to describe the personal contributions of selfsufficient or desperate translators (or actors who have forgotten their speeches). Here are some grotesque examples of otsebyatina in Arndt. Pushkin is describing (Eight: xxiv) the guests at Princess N's soiree: «Here were, in mobcaps and roses elderly ladies, wicked looking; here were several maidens — unsmiling faces». This is all there is about those ladies and maidens, but Arndt otsebyatinates thus: «... redecorated ladies with caps from France and scowls from Hades; among them here and there a girl without a smile from curl to curl (a fiendish ungrin!). My other example refers to One: xxxiii where Pushkin has a famous description of «the waves, running in turbulent succession, with love to lie down at her feet»; this becomes «the waves . . . with uproar each the other goading, to curl in love about her feet». One hardly knows what infects one's fancy more painfully here — those waves prodding each other with tridents or that little drain-hole vortex in which their «uproar» ends.