Name: Eugene Onegin
ISBN: 9781984993038

Eugene Onegin

Eugene Oneginis the master work of the poet whom Russians regard as the fountainhead of their literature. Set in 1820s Russia, Pushkin's verse novel follows the fates of three men and three women. Engaging, full of suspense, and varied in tone, it also portrays a large cast of othercharacters and offers the reader many literary, philosophical, and autobiographical digressions, often in a highly satirical vein.Eugene Oneginwas Pushkin's own favourite work, and this new translation conveys the literal sense and the poetic music of the original.

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svatFeb 2024

The most valuable thing about GEB for me was how self-indulgent it is. The book is entirely Hofstadter having fun: all those tricky dialogues, acrostics, puns where the setup and payoff are hundreds of pages apart, the marrying of form and content, just the overall tone of excited sharing…. Hofstadter has put a lot of himself into it—it's a deeply personal book—and it was revealing to me to see that one's emotions don't have to be set aside when writing, nor is it necessary for the kinds of feelings that mathematics evokes to be “translated” into more familiar ones.

(Edit: As an aside, Hofstadter's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin is similarly self-indulgent, and a joy to read. Of course one ought to read a couple of other translations first and keep them nearby, to become familiar with the content, but in terms of sheer wordplay and outrageous rhymes, it tops anything.) (Edit 2: Ha, a search reveals I posted a similar comment a little over a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32830008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32878471)

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undowareDec 2021

1. _The Question Concerning Technology_ by Martin Heidegger. Taught me how clean-room language reinvention can be a tool for clear thinking, and how you cannot add something without taking something away. Truth is "revealing and concealing" because it is, outside math and hard science, perspectival. Essential reading for UX engineers.

2. _Eichmann in Jerusalem_, Hannah Arendt. Made me wiser about how evil works. "Evil" is a fun word to throw around and lends itself to silly political slogans, but the real thing is no joke, is out there, and does not look like what you think.

3. _Eugene Onegin_, by Pushkin, as translated by Douglas Hofstadter (yes, that one). The man taught himself Russian by translating the Onegin to distract himself after his wife died. The foreword-essay changed how I regard language and translation.

3. _Getting Unstuck_, by Pema Chodron. I still use this shit every time I get obsessive about some coding thing. Wise AF.

4. _Getting Things Done_ by David Allen. Everything is an interface and everything is algorithmic, your only choice is whether or not to consciously intend them. You can engineer better habits.

5. A biography of Malcolm X -- I forget which one, embarrassingly, and I am in a hurry so I will not google. Whichever one came out closest to the year 2007 :)

These days tho I would grab _The Dead are Arising_ -- the most recent. It's aleady on my Kobo. Malcolm X showed me how to survive in hell and start a movement.

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submaroonApr 2020

My first thought was to suggest finding multiple English translations of a piece of Hebrew Literature you like and comparing them. Then I remembered the linked article, which is a comparison of four different English translations of the verse novel Eugene Onegin, by Alexander Pushkin. The article was written by Douglas Hofstadter, a professor of cognitive science and comparative literature at Indiana University who has an essay collection called Metamagical Themas (an anagram of Mathematical Games). The first few essays are about self-referential sentences and a subset of those, self-replicating sentences, which you really have to read to believe. Maybe check out his book Gödel, Escher, Bach. It won the Pulitzer, but if you pick it up, just remember that when you get confused, it’s his fault, not yours.

But Winston Churchill said it best, and this is great advice: “short words are best, and old words, when short, are best of all”.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/07/20/r...

https://www.powells.com/book/-9780465045662

https://www.powells.com/book/-9780465026562

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svatJul 2018

A lot of people think that the goal of the book was to explain Gödel's theorem. Some even think the book shows that "mathematics, art and music are the same". In fact, as Hofstadter says in the preface (to the 20th Anniversary Edition I think), this is utter nonsense and he intended no such thing: his goal with the book was to build up a certain philosophical argument about what consciousness is (and his answer was something like self-reference, or transcending "levels").

I might be misquoting this, because, like most people, I found the way he builds up this argument more fun and memorable and interesting than the argument itself.

Do not read the book to understand Gödel's theorem, or Escher, or Bach. In fact, Hofstadter is not even really interested in Gödel's theorem itself: his interest is more in the particular trick that Gödel used to prove the theorem (Gödel numbering), which allows Gödel to encode statements about the system as arithmetic statements (within the system). And although the explanation in GEB is surely not the best explanations of Gödel's theorem, it is one of the most enjoyable musings on things "like" Gödel numbering — something you won't find in other places that are more interested in Gödel's theorem itself.

I think if one tries to read the book expecting to learn or understand something, one can get frustrated. But like other Pulitzer-Prize winners for nonfiction (say The Soul of a New Machine), any learning is only incidental; what one can enjoy is the way the book is constructed. It is a work of literature, not mathematics. The dialogues are my favourite parts of the book — sure they may not be realistic, but they take surprising turns, they often have a lot hidden in them (I remember reading one half way through and suddenly suspecting something, then noticing that they formed an acrostic, reading the first letters down the page). Other things I most loved about the book is the way it is self-referential, the way everything fits together, elaborate puns seem to be set up over a course of 300 pages, etc.

All in all, it is a book just simply of Hofstadter having fun.

(I had the same impression of Hofstadter's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin — I've read at least three other translations; Hofstadter's may not be most literal but it's surely enjoyable and with the most outrageous rhymes: who else would rhyme "debts" with "Till his creditors cast their nyets"! You can read online an article he wrote [1] before starting his own translation, then a very critical review of his translation [2] but whose "bad" examples (and the whole first chapter linked there) show what's actually fun.)

You can see him enjoying himself, and you can go along if you'd like to have fun as well, forgiving a few things here and there, skipping parts that you don't find as much fun.

[1]: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/07/20/r...

[2]: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/09/12/r...

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anatolyOct 2009

It's hard to name only two. I'll choose two that deserve to be more famous than they are, in my opinion.

Helen DeWitt's _The Last Samurai_ (no relation to the Tom Cruise movie) is the best novel I've read in years, a brilliant tale of an absurdly precocious childhood, with several more rich tales of their own value nested inside. Anyone who finds curiosity and love of knowledge one of their defining qualities should read this book.

Vikram Seth's _The Golden Gate_ is a smart, funny and moving novel set in the Silicon Valley of the early 80ies. Astonishingly, it's written in verse, in the rhyme scheme of the classic Russian masterpiece _Eugene Onegin_ by Pushkin, which Seth read in translation and loved so much he decided to write a modern American novel in verse. His execution of this unorthodox idea is terrific.

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idoubtitNov 2025

I share many of the author's delights. I would add another source of "short little difficult books": old books, written in an old form of your modern language.

My native tongue is French, so in my case it was Rabelais' "Gargantua" (~1500) and "La Chanson de Roland" (~1100). Both books require some motivation to get used to their respective languages. After a while, I could read almost fluently Rabelais' prose ; it was immensely funny, coarse and impudent. Roland was harder to grasp, I had to use a specialized dictionary, but it's a concise and epic tale, and I read some verses so many times I ended learning them by rote.

Even translated, some short books from a very different culture far in the past can be challenging. For instance "Eugene Onegin" or "Gilgamesh". As a counterpoint, "The art of war" is an easy read, though written 2300 years ago in a small kingdom of China.

A last comment: the author conflate books that are difficult because of a technicality in their writing, and those that are strange in their story. The translations of Abe Kobo or Kafka I've read had nothing difficult in their words, but the surrealist plots were very unsettling. In "Pedro Páramo" the reader feels lost in a harsh world and unsure of reality. Meanwhile, Perec's "La disparition" or Becket's "Molloy" are more about style tricks.

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