Free The Meaning of Recognition by Clive James Page B

pedigree dog’s breakfast, but at least there was no mistaking
it for anything uninspired. Binyon, providing samples not only of
Onegin
but of all the other major poetry as well, just wants to give us the sense: an aim less diffident than it sounds.
In a text otherwise packed with unpredictable information, the translated extracts stand out only for their lack of pressure. A reader making a start with Pushkin is unlikely to be astonished by
this material, and the book thus places itself automatically further down the track, as a tool to be employed after a first acquaintance is well established. This is an opportunity missed, because
the book could easily have done a double duty if the verse had been presented with something of the appropriate formal punch. If Johnston’s
Onegin
was not available for contractual
reasons, those of us who admired it so volubly when it came out were often inclined to underplay the substantial merits of the Walter Arndt translation it superseded. The Arndt version sometimes
dithers when it tries to dazzle, but falls less often than you might think into the usual trap of a strained sprightliness. Binyon avoids that trap by avoiding formal bravura altogether. As a
consequence he can only assert Pushkin’s first attraction without illustrating it. In Pushkin’s poetic forms, language assembled itself as if answering the requirements of the human
memory. Nabokov called the Onegin stanza ‘an acoustical paradise’, a term that applies just as well to every other form Pushkin employed from childhood onward. Right from the beginning,
people couldn’t take their ears off him. ‘The rascal will crush us all,’ said one of his seniors to another. Army officers otherwise unremarkable for their sensibility were
quoting him by heart when he was barely out of school. Had Mr Binyon given us a fair idea of that, he might have had a more convincing back-up for his further assertion – by its nature harder
to exemplify – that Pushkin was just as astonishing in real life. A twitching victim of the fidgets, he couldn’t keep still for five minutes, but people couldn’t stop listening
either. When Pushkin the socialite was on the case, even the dumber fashionable ladies thought they were in the living presence of poetry, and the brighter ones easily assumed that his
unprepossessing outer appearance might be a further guarantee of the flaming genius within.
    Pushkin had black blood, but it didn’t make him Denzel Washington. It might have done had he had more of it. As things were, his vestigial negritude gave him a distinct edge in the area of
his mouth, traditionally one of the few physical points about a man that interest a woman at a first meeting, an occasion in which Pushkin’s mouth was likely to be saying fascinating things,
some of them unwarrantably familiar. From chin to eyebrows, here was a face designed to focus female attention. But the rest of him was miscast. A small man with a tall forehead and long arms, he
was convinced that his yellow fingernails would be more interesting if worn as long as possible. He was almost certainly wrong about that, yet if he did not always enslave the frequently altering
object of desire, he was never less than in with a chance. And the chance was there for the taking. Though the fashionable world was a marriage market in which there were few deals without a dowry,
it reeked of glamorous eroticism. Physical beauty was everywhere: even the young men were peacocks, and the women were birds of paradise. A peacock who married a bird of paradise would have been
disappointed if she lost her pulling power, whose continued efficacy was the warrant that he had chosen well. Like the Red Army’s female soldiers in the next century, the belles of St
Petersburg were back on duty within hours of giving birth: the ballroom was their front line. To look lovely was their reason for being. The susceptible Pushkin was faced with a multiple revelation