“I wonder, can one see the master house?”
asked Tanya. Speedily
the children to Anisia ran
4 to get the hallway keys from her.
Anisia came forth to her promptly, and the door
before them opened,
and Tanya stepped into the empty house,
8 where recently our hero had been living.
She looked: in the reception room forgotten,
a cue reposed upon the billiard table;
upon a rumpled sofa lay
12 a riding crop. Tanya went on.
The old crone said to her: “And here's the fireplace;
here master used to sit alone.
XVIII
“Here in the winter the late Lenski,
our neighbor, used to dine with him.
This way, please, follow me.
4 This was the master's study;
he used to sleep here, take his coffee, listen
to the steward's reports,
and in the morning read a book....
8 And the old master lived here too;
on Sundays, at this window here,
time was, donning his spectacles,
he'd deign to play ‘tomfools’ with me.
12 God grant salvation to his soul
and peace to his dear bones
in the grave, in damp mother earth!”
XIX
Tatiana looks with melting gaze
at everything around her,
and all to her seems priceless,
4 all quickens her languorous soul
with a half-painful joyance:
the desk with its extinguished lamp,
a pile of books, and at the window
8 a carpet-covered bed, and from the window
the prospect through the lunar gloom,
and this pale half-light, and Lord Byron's portrait,
and a small column
12 with a cast-iron statuette
with clouded brow under a hat,
with arms crosswise compressed.
XX
Tatiana in the modish cell
stands long as one bewitched.
But it is late. A cold wind has arisen.
4 It's dark in the dale. The grove sleeps
above the misted river;
the moon has hid behind the hill,
and it is time, high time,
8 that the young pilgrimess went home;
and Tanya, hiding her excitement,
and not without a sigh,
starts out on her way back;
12 but first she asks permission
to visit the deserted castle
so as to read books there alone.
XXI
Beyond the gate Tatiana parted
with the housekeeper. A day later,
early at morn this time, again she came
4 to the abandoned shelter,
and in the silent study, for a while
to all on earth oblivious, she
remained at last alone,
8 and long she wept.
Then to the books she turned.
At first she was not in a mood for them,
but their choice seemed to her
12 bizarre. Tatiana fell to reading
with avid soul; and there revealed itself
a different world to her.
XXII
Although we know that Eugene
had long ceased to like reading,
still, several works
4 he had exempted from disgrace:
the singer of the Giaour and Juan
and, with him, also two or three
novels in which the epoch is reflected
8 and modern man
rather correctly represented
with his immoral soul,
selfish and dry,
12 to dreaming measurelessly given,
with his embittered mind
boiling in empty action.
XXIII
Many pages preserved
the trenchant mark of fingernails;
the eyes of the attentive maiden
4 are fixed on them more eagerly.
Tatiana sees with trepidation
by what thought, observation
Onegin would be struck,
8 what he agreed with tacitly.
The dashes of his pencil she
encounters in their margins.
Unconsciously Onegin's soul
12 has everywhere expressed itself —
now by a succinct word, now by a cross,
now by an interrogatory crotchet.