“Tell me, which was Tatiana?”
“Oh, she's the one who, sad
and silent like Svetlana,
4 came in and sat down by the window.”
“Can it be it's the younger one
that you're in love with?” “Why not?” “I'd have chosen
the other, had I been like you a poet.
8 In Olga's features there's no life,
just as in a Vandyke Madonna:
she's round and fair of face
as is that silly moon
12 up in that silly sky.”
Vladimir answered curtly
and thenceforth the whole way was silent.
VI
Meanwhile Onegin's apparition
at the Larins' produced
on everyone a great impression
4 and regaled all the neighbors.
Conjecture on conjecture followed.
All started furtively to talk,
to joke, to comment not without some malice,
8 a suitor for Tatiana to assign.
Some folks asserted even that
the wedding was quite settled,
but had been stayed because
12 of fashionable rings' not being got.
Concerning Lenski's wedding, long ago
they had it all arranged.
VII
Tatiana listened with vexation
to gossip of that sort; but secretly
she with ineffable elation
4 could not help thinking of it;
and the thought sank into her heart;
the time had come — she fell in love.
Thus, dropped into the earth, a seed
8 is quickened by the fire of spring.
For long had her imagination,
consumed with mollitude and anguish,
craved for the fatal food;
12 for long had the heart's languishment
constrained her youthful bosom;
her soul waited — for somebody.
VIII
And not in vain it waited. Her eyes opened;
she said: “'Tis he!”
Alas! now both the days and nights,
4 and hot, lone sleep,
all's full of him; to the dear girl
unceasingly with magic force
all speaks of him. To her are tedious
8 alike the sounds of friendly speeches
and the gaze of assiduous servants.
Immersed in gloom,
to visitors she does not listen,
12 and imprecates their leisures,
their unexpected
arrival and protracted sitting down.
IX
With what attention does she now
read some delicious novel,
with what vivid enchantment
4 imbibe the ravishing illusion!
Creations by the happy power
of dreaming animated,
the lover of Julie Wolmar,
8 Malek-Adhel, and de Linar,
and Werther, restless martyr,
and the inimitable Grandison,18 who brings upon us somnolence —
12 all for the tender, dreamy girl
have been invested with a single image,
have in Onegin merged alone.
X
Imagining herself the heroine
of her beloved authors —
Clarissa, Julia, Delphine —
4 Tatiana in the stillness of the woods
alone roams with a dangerous book;
in it she seeks and finds
her secret ardency, her dreams,
8 the fruits of the heart's fullness;
she sighs, and having made her own
another's ecstasy, another's woe,
she whispers in a trance, by heart,
12 a letter to the amiable hero.
But our hero, whoever he might be,
was certainly no Grandison.
XI
His style to a grave strain having attuned,
time was, a fervid author
used to present to us
4 his hero as a model of perfection.
He'd furnish the loved object —
always iniquitously persecuted —
with a sensitive soul, intelligence,
8 and an attractive face.
Nursing the ardor of the purest passion,
the always enthusiastic hero
was ready for self-sacrifice,
12 and by the end of the last part, vice always
got punished,
and virtue got a worthy crown.
XII
But nowadays all minds are in a mist,
a moral brings upon us somnolence,
vice is attractive in a novel, too,
4 and there, at least, it triumphs.
The fables of the British Muse
disturb the young girl's sleep,
and now her idol has become
8 either the pensive Vampyre,
or Melmoth, gloomy vagabond,
or the Wandering Jew, or the Corsair,
or the mysterious Sbogar.1912 Lord Byron, by an opportune caprice,
in woebegone romanticism
draped even hopeless egotism.