The Little House at Kolomna by Alexander Pushkin

Translated by Peter Cochran

Introduction

Pushkin published too late for his reputation to reach Byron. He appears in neither of John Bowring’s anthologies of Russian poetry, at least one of which Byron knew[1]: if Byron had read a Bowring-ized version of The Fountain of Bakhchisarai, for example, he would have felt strangely flattered to see his earlier self being used as model. On the other hand, the influence Byron had on Pushkin was (via French paraphrases[2]) considerable, although it is not well documented in English. Here I consider one aspect of it only.

On Translating Alexander Pushkin’s Angelo 

Ivan Eubanks

My aim in translating Angelo has been to reproduce as much as possible the impression it made on me in Russian, so that Anglophones can get some glimpse of the pace and tone of a verse narrative by Pushkin.  Pushkin’s meter and rhyme scheme have not been duplicated here, nor is this a literal, prose translation.  The advantages of both these extremes have been sacrificed in hope of gaining a sound more natural to English poetry, so that for a least a few moments readers who try to forget they have a translation before them might do so.