Volume 11, Number 6 · October 10, 1968
Grand Master
By Helen Muchnic
The Complete Prose Tales of Alexander Sergeyevitch Pushkin
translated by Gillon R. Aitken
Norton, 495 pp., $6.95
Baron Delvig's "Northern Flowers"
by John Mercereau Jr.
Southern Illinois University Press, 267 pp., $8.50
Pushkin: Death of a Poet
by Walter N. Vickery
Indiana University Press, 146 pp., $5.75
Pushkin
by David Magarshack
Chapman & Hall, 320 pp., 63s.
English readers are no doubt tired of hearing that unless they learn Russian they must take Pushkin's greatness on faith. Unfortunately, whatever one may say or not say, this is the truth. Pushkin is still untranslatable, and will remain so unless another Pasternak arises who will do for him in English what Pasternak was able to do for Shakespeare in Russian. But his prose is more accessible to translation than his poetry, and it has been Englished quite satisfactorily several times. The latest version by Gillon Aitken is also adequate but not superior, it seems to me, to other good ones, not better certainly than T. Keane's, which was first published in 1915 and then revised by Avrahm Yarmolinsky for his anthology of Pushkin in the Modern Library.
Review, 2254 words
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