But passions occupied more often
the minds of my two anchorets.
Having escaped from their tumultuous power,
4 Onegin spoke of them
with an involuntary sigh of regret.
Happy who knew their agitations
and finally detached himself from them;
8 still happier who did not know them, who
cooled love with separation, enmity
with obloquy; sometimes
with friends and wife yawned, undisturbed
12 by jealous torment,
and the safe capital of forefathers
did not entrust to a perfidious deuce!
XVIII
When we have flocked under the banner
of sage tranquillity,
when the flame of the passions has gone out
4 and laughable become to us
their waywardness
or surgings and belated echoes;
reduced to sense not without trouble,
8 sometimes we like to listen
to the tumultuous language of the passions
of others, and it stirs our heart;
exactly thus an old disabled soldier
12 does willingly bend an assiduous ear
to the yarns of young mustached braves,
[while he remains] forgotten in his shack.
XIX
Now flaming youthhood, on the other hand,
cannot hide anything:
enmity, love, sadness, and joy
4 'tis ready to blab out.
Deemed invalided as to love,
with a grave air Onegin listened
as, loving the confession of the heart,
8 the poet his whole self expressed.
His trustful conscience
naïvely he laid bare.
Eugene learned without trouble
12 the youthful story of his love —
a tale abounding in emotions
long since not new to us.
XX
Ah, he loved as one loves
no longer in our years; as only
the mad soul of a poet
4 is still condemned to love:
always, and everywhere, one reverie,
one customary wish,
one customary woe!
8 Neither the cooling distance,
nor the long years of separation,
nor hours given to the Muses,
nor foreign beauties,
12 nor noise of merriments, nor studies,
had changed in him a soul
warmed by a virgin fire.
XXI
When scarce a boy, by Olga captivated,
not having known yet torments of the heart,
he'd been a tender witness
4 of her infantine frolics.
He, in the shade of a protective park,
had shared her frolics,
and for these children wedding crowns
8 their fathers, who were friends and neighbors, destined.
In the backwoods, beneath a humble roof,
full of innocent charm,
she under the eyes of her parents
12 bloomed like a hidden lily of the valley
which is unknown in the dense grass
to butterflies or to the bee.
XXII
She gave the poet the first dream
of youthful transports,
and the thought of her animated
4 his pipe's first moan.
Farewell, golden games! He
began to like thick groves,
seclusion, stillness, and the night,
8 and the stars, and the moon —
the moon, celestial lamp,
to which we dedicated
walks midst the evening darkness,
12 and tears, of secret pangs the solace...
But now we only see in her
a substitute for bleary lanterns.
XXIII
Always modest, always obedient,
always as merry as the morn,
as naïve as a poet's life,
4 as winsome as love's kiss;
her eyes, as azure as the sky,
smile, flaxen locks,
movements, voice, light waist — everything
8 in Olga... but take any novel,
and you will surely find
her portrait; it is very sweet;
I liked it once myself,
12 but it has come to bore me beyond measure.
Let me, my reader,
take up the elder sister.