3. I ask, therefore, no forgiveness, no indulgence even, from the reader for the crudeness and even harshness of the translation, which, I dare say, will be found in abundance by those who look for something to blame. Nothing of the kind is necessary. I have done the only thing there was to be done. Nothing more could be done (I mean by me, of course), and if critics still demand more, they must settle it not with me, but with the Lord Almighty, who in his grim, yet arch way, long before critics appeared on the stage, hath ordained that it shall be impossible for a thing to be and not to be at the same time.
4. I have therefore tried neither for measure nor for rhyme. What I have done was this: I first translated each line word for word, and then by reading it aloud let mine ear arrange for me the words in such a way as to make some kind of rhythm. Where this could be done, I was indeed glad; where this could not be done, I was not sorry. It is idle to regret the impossible.
5. That the reader, however, may see for himself what he has been spared by my abstinence from attempting the impossible, I give one stanza of a metrical translation by the side of the literal rendering:—
LITERAL:
The moment wondrous I remember
Thou before me didst appear,
Like a flashing apparition,
Like a spirit of beauty pure.
METRICAL:[1]
Yes! I remember well our meeting,
When first thou dawnedst on my sight,
Like some fair phantom past me fleeting,
Some nymph of purity and light.
Observe, Pushkin the real does not appear before the reader with a solemn affirmation, Yes, or No, nor that he remembers it well. He tells the story in such a way that the reader knows without being told that he does indeed remember it well! Nor does he weaken the effect by saying that he remembers the meeting, which is too extended, but the moment, which is concentrated. And Pushkin's imagination was moreover too pure to let a fleeting phantom dawn upon his sight. To have tried for a rendering which necessitated from its very limitations such falsities, would have been not only to libel poor Pushkin, but also to give the reader poor poetry besides.
[1] Blackwood's Magazine, lviii. 35, July, 1845.