To love submissive, love he sang,
and his song was as clear
as a naïve maid's thoughts,
4 as the sleep of an infant, as the moon
in the untroubled deserts of the sky,
goddess of mysteries and tender sighs.
He sang parting and sadness,
8 and a vague something, and the dim
remoteness, and romantic roses.
He sang those distant lands
where long into the bosom of the stillness
12 flowed his live tears.
He sang life's faded bloom
at not quite eighteen years of age.
XI
In the wilderness where Eugene alone
was able to appreciate his gifts,
he cared not for the banquets of the masters
4 of neighboring manors;
he fled their noisy concourse.
Their reasonable talk
of haymaking, of liquor,
8 of kennel, of their kin,
no doubt did not sparkle with feeling,
or with poetic fire,
or sharp wit, or intelligence,
12 or with the art of sociability;
but the talk of their sweet wives was
much less intelligent.
XII
Wealthy, good-looking, Lenski everywhere
was as a marriageable man received:
such is the country custom;
4 all for their daughters planned a match
with the half-Russian neighbor.
Whenever he drops in, at once the conversation
broaches a word, obliquely,
8 about the tedium of bachelor life;
the neighbor is invited to the samovar,
and Dunya pours the tea;
they whisper to her: “Dunya, mark!”
12 Then the guitar (that, too) is brought,
and she will start to shrill (good God!):
“Come to me in my golden castle!..”12
XIII
But Lenski, having no desire, of course,
to bear the bonds of marriage,
wished cordially to strike up with Onegin
4 a close acquaintanceship.
They got together; wave and stone,
verse and prose, ice and flame,
were not so different from one another.
8 At first, because of mutual
disparity, they found each other dull;
then liked each other; then
met riding every day on horseback,
12 and soon became inseparable.
Thus people — I'm the first to own it —
out of do-nothingness are friends.
XIV
But among us there's even no such friendship:
having destroyed all prejudices, we
deem all men naughts
4 and ourselves units.
We all aspire to be Napoleons;
for us the millions
of two-legged creatures are but tools;
8 feeling to us is weird and ludicrous.
More tolerant than many was Eugene,
though he, of course, knew men
and on the whole despised them;
12 but no rules are without exceptions:
some people he distinguished greatly
and, though estranged from it, respected feeling.
XV
He listened with a smile to Lenski:
the poet's fervid conversation,
and mind still vacillant in judgments,
4 and gaze eternally inspired —
all this was novel to Onegin;
the chilling word
on his lips he tried to restrain,
8 and thought: foolish of me
to interfere with his brief rapture;
without me just as well that time will come;
meanwhile let him live and believe
12 in the perfection of the world;
let us forgive the fever of young years
both its young ardor and young ravings.
XVI
Between them everything engendered
discussions and led to reflection:
the pacts of bygone races,
4 the fruits of learning, Good and Evil,
and centuried prejudices,
and the grave's fateful mysteries,
destiny and life in their turn —
8 all was subjected to their judgment.
The poet in the heat of his contentions
recited, in a trance, meantime,
fragments of Nordic poems,
12 and lenient Eugene,
although he did not understand them much,
would dutifully listen to the youth.