This group of rhymes has no inbuilt preference for one sonnet form over another. Everything depends on the sense and where you place the punctuation. If, according to his whim, the poet chooses to end a proposition at line eight and develop it over the next six lines, he can do so and will produce the following grouping:
[ababccdd] + [effegg]
As a matter of interest, the sestet may be construed as [eff ] + [egg] or [effe] + [gg], again according to where the sense provides a strong line-ending. In either case, there will be an Italian feel to the sonnet as long as the sense comes to strong conclusion—with a full-stop, question mark, exclamation mark or at least a semi-colon—at the end of line eight.
On another occasion he may want the sense to run on down the stanza and come to a resonant conclusion in a powerful final couplet. The way to do this is to take the emphasis away from line eight and supply a strong ending for line twelve. His stanza will then assume the English shape, as follows:
[abab ccdd effe] + [gg]
Pushkin makes full use of this inbuilt flexibility. Almost all of his stanzas begin with a clearly defined first quatrain—there is usually strong punctuation at the end of line four—and a majority of them seem to favour the English mode, because of the limitless possibilities in the terminal couplet for all sorts of striking effects (humour is common among them). But beyond these general observations nothing is predictable. The Onegin stanza is a mettlesome creature; when it starts out you can never tell where it may take you, or by what route. Similarly, when you look back on a stanza it will not remind you of its predecessor, nor of any other stanza; each one will seem to be what it is, a unique little lyric in its own right. Variety of this kind is a true friend, a strong defence against tedium.
Apart from its flexibility, this stanza has one further property underwriting its richness. Two-thirds of the way through it, the reader is almost certain to lose all sense of direction in formal terms. However well you know Pushkin, and this novel in particular, you are not likely to escape the feeling of disorientation in the region of lines eight, nine, ten and eleven. The rhymes fall out in such a way that it is difficult to see immediately in any of these lines whether you are completing a rhyme set up earlier (and precisely where this might have been) or starting a new one. It is surprising to note that in a stanza so carefully regulated by rhyme there are three occasions when three successive lines do not rhyme with each other: [abc], [def ] and [feg]. Two of these three occasions occur at this point in the stanza. All of this creates an impression of greater complexity than really exists, promotes subtlety and suggests mystery. One famous critic has likened this poetic performance to that of a painted ball set spinning: you see its pattern clearly at the beginning and end of its movement, but in mid-spin all you get is a colourful blur.
To sum up: the Onegin stanza is an imaginative version of the sonnet, consisting of three four-line groups, each with a different pattern of rhymes—an easy “alternating” quatrain [abab], a quatrain made up of two couplets [ccdd] and an “envelope” quatrain [effe]—all of this topped off with a strong couplet [gg]. A rhyming formula that looks rigid turns out to be the last word in flexibility. But there is one further complication, which gives rise to the biggest single difficulty for the translator of this magical work—the feminine rhyme. This is not just a problem; it is an intractable bugbear, for the treatment of which you need a bold strategy. Feminine Rhymes
Paired words ending in a single stressed syllable are called “masculine” rhymes: for example, “what/spot”, “man/began”, “displease/striptease”. There are masses of these in English and in Russian. The problem arises with “feminine” rhymes, in which a stressed syllable is followed by an unstressed one, as in “token/spoken” or “level/bedevil”. Russian can form pleasing rhymes like this with ease; English cannot. In English there are so few feminine rhymes available that they strike us as boring. When you hear the word “languish”, isn’t it all too easy to guess what its rhyme will be? There is no other rhyme than “anguish”. “Feature” belongs only to “creature”, “habit” to “rabbit” and “sentence” to “repentance”. True, you can make up plenty of feminine rhymes by using common noun endings such as those ending in “-tion”, but these tend to be both obvious and tedious. Verbal rhymes are easily formed but utterly boring, especially participles like “hoping/moping” or “related/dated”. Almost all the available feminine rhymes in English are unusable because of their wearisome predictability, which is why our poets avoid them (unless you are a humorist like W.S. Gilbert).
Pushkin uses feminine rhymes throughout Yevgeny Onegin on a regular, alternating basis. This can be demonstrated best by giving feminine rhymes a capital letter and using lower case for masculine ones. The stanza which we have described actually rhymes like this: AbAb, CCdd, EffE, gg. Six of the endings are feminine (two syllables) and the other eight are masculine (one syllable). Here are the rhymes used for the opening stanza of the novel in one of the better English translations (with the feminine rhymes picked out):
AbAb: condition, prune, recognition, opportune CCdd: others, brothers, day, away EffE: glaring, dead, head, bearing gg: cough, off
If you look closely at, say, the rhymed dedication to this novel and its first stanza you will discover that every single existing translation employs more than one rhyme that can only be described as weak by being obvious, hackneyed, verbal or ending in “-tion”.
No one is going to notice anything wrong with the choice of these rhymes taken individually, but really they are far from ideal. The first pair belongs to that tedious group of words ending in “-tion”, the second pair are so obvious as to be virtually inevitable, and the third pair depend upon another tedious termination in “-ing”. You will not find many lazy rhyming pairs like these in the works of our major poets. And, although they float past unnoticed in any particular stanza, you can imagine the soporific effect of their use on a regular basis. To take a particularly unfortunate example, one translator uses the following six feminine rhymes in one stanza: reflection/complexion, fascination/condemnation, conversation/disputation; elsewhere he allows this sequence covering three successive stanzas: waiting/abating, agreed with/speed with, unsuspecting/inspecting, pretension/condescension, arising/apprising, rolling/strolling—all of them rather tedious (except for the splendidly surprising “agreed with/speed with”). He is not alone. Here are the feminine rhymes from one stanza in another version: inscribing/gibing, imbibing/transcribing, sobbing/throbbing, with quacking/a-lacking quick to follow in the next verse. Similarly, one of the very best translations allows a succession of verbal rhymes as long as this: quicken/thicken, quivers/shivers, playing/saying, pleading/reading, presented/invented. In at least two versions you will find a stanza using nothing but present participles for all of its six feminine rhymes: descending/wending, flaring/faring, commanding/standing, and grieving/receiving, keeping/sleeping, waiting/debating. Hardly what you would encounter in Milton or Wordsworth. (Incidentally, my German translation of this work demonstrates this tendency even more effectively. At the start of the fourth chapter, for example, the first twenty-one stanzas begin in a discouraging way. Pushkin has omitted the first six stanzas; stanza 7 begins with the feminine rhyme stehen/gehen, stanza 8 with verstellen/darzustellen, and so it goes on down to stanza 26 with vorzulesen/Menschenwesen and stanza 27 with reiten/Seiten. Only one stanza (10) fails to end in an “-n”. Of the others only 15 and 19 fail to end in “-en”. All the others—that is, eighteen out of twenty-one stanzas—have the same two letters as an ending for the opening feminine rhyme. Does everything in German have to end in an “-n”? The tedium experienced when reading pages treated in this way must stand as a stark warning to any new anglophone translator tempted in this direction.)