As to the love of tender beauties,
'tis surer than friendship or kin:
even mid restless tempests you retain
4 rights over it.
No doubt, so. But one has to reckon
with fashion's whirl, with nature's waywardness,
with the stream of the monde's opinion —
8 while the sweet sex is light as fluff.
Moreover, the opinions of her husband
should by a virtuous wife
be always honored;
12 your faithful mistress thus
may in a trice be swept away:
with love jokes Satan.
XXII
Whom, then, to love? Whom to believe?
Who is the only one that won't betray us?
Who measures all deeds and all speeches
4 obligingly by our own foot rule?
Who does not sow slander about us?
Who coddles us with care?
To whom our vice is not so bad?
8 Who never bores us?
Efforts in vain not wasting
(as would a futile phantom-seeker),
love your own self,
12 my worthly honored reader.
A worthy object! Surely, nothing
more amiable exists.
XXIII
What was the consequence of the interview?
Alas, it is not hard to guess!
Love's frenzied sufferings
4 did not stop agitating
the youthful soul avid of sadness;
nay, poor Tatiana more intensely
with joyless passion burns;
8 sleep shuns her bed;
health, life's bloom and its sweetness,
smile, virginal tranquillity —
all, like an empty sound, have ceased to be,
12 and gentle Tanya's youth is darkling:
thus a storm's shadow clothes
the scarce-born day.
XXIV
Alas, Tatiana fades away,
grows pale, is wasting, and is mute!
Nothing beguiles her
4 or moves her soul.
Shaking gravely their heads,
among themselves the neighbors whisper:
Time, time she married!...
8 But that will do. I must make haste
to cheer the imagination with the picture
of happy love.
I cannot help, my dears,
12 being constrained by pity;
forgive me: I do love so much
my dear Tatiana!
XXV
From hour to hour more captivated
by the attractions of young Olga,
Vladimir to delicious thralldom
4 fully gave up his soul.
He's ever with her. In her chamber
they sit together in the dark;
or in the garden, arm in arm,
8 they stroll at morningtide;
and what of it? With love intoxicated,
in the confusion of a tender shame,
he only dares sometimes,
12 by Olga's smile encouraged,
play with an unwound curl
or kiss the border of her dress.
XXVI
Sometimes he reads to Olya
a moralistic novel —
in which the author
4 knows nature better than Chateaubriand —
and, meanwhile, two-three pages
(empty chimeras, fables,
for hearts of maidens dangerous)
8 he blushingly leaves out.
Retiring far from everybody,
over the chessboard they,
leaning their elbows on the table,
12 at times sit deep in thought,
and Lenski in abstraction takes
with a pawn his own rook.
XXVII
When he drives home, at home he also
is with his Olga occupied,
the volatile leaves of an album
4 assiduously adorns for her:
now draws therein agrestic views,
a gravestone, the temple of Cypris,
or a dove on a lyre
8 (using a pen and, slightly, colors);
now on the pages of remembrance,
beneath the signatures of others,
he leaves a tender verse —
12 mute monument of reverie,
an instant thought's light trace,
still, after many years, the same.