"Mr. Nabokov, before the publication of his own translation of Evgeni Onegin, took up a good deal of space in these pages to denounce a previous translation by Professor Walter Arndt. [   ] Professor Arndt had attempted the tour de force of translating the whole of Onegin into the original iambic tetrameter and rather intricate stanza form. Mr. Nabokov decided that this could not be done with any real fidelity to the meaning and undertook to make a “literal” translation which maintains an iambic base but quite often simply jolts into prose [   ] It has produced a bald and awkward language which has nothing in common with Pushkin or with the usual writing of Nabokov. One knows Mr. Nabokov’s virtuosity in juggling with the English language, the prettiness and wit of his verbal inventions. One knows also the perversity of his tricks to startle or stick pins in the reader; and one suspects that his perversity here has been exercised in curbing his brilliance; that—with his sado-masochistic Dostoevskian tendencies so acutely noted by Sartre *—he seeks to torture both the reader and himself by flattening Pushkin out and denying to his own powers the scope for their full play.abokov does not quite understand, as he occasionally betrays, in his otherwise delightful English verse, when he momentarily runs off the rails, and as he makes very plain in this essay. In order to deal with English verse, you need to talk about only five feet: the iambus, the trochee, the anapaest, the dactyl, and the spondee. The very conception of the spondee seems for some reason to irritate Nabokov. He denies that real spondees exist, for the strange reason that “no poem, not even a couplet, can be wholly made up of them.” [   ] This appendix, however, contains admirable pages on the differences between Russian and English. For example: " The Russian iambic tetrameter [the meter in which Onegin is written] is a solid, polished, disciplined thing, with rich concentrated meaning and lofty melody fused in an organic entity: It has said in Russian what the pentameter has said in English, and the hexameter in French. Now on the other hand, the English iambic tetrameter is a hesitating, loose, capricious form, always in danger of having its opening semeion chopped off, or of being diluted by a recurrent trimeter, or of developing a cadential lilt. The English form has been instrumental in producing a quantity of admirable short poems but has never achieved anything approaching, either in sheer length or artistic importance, a stanzaic romance comparable to Eugene Onegin.'."

 

3. A sighting from implicatedisorder.wordpress.com/.../emily-dickin... - In relation to the frequently used metres in English poetry, "the iambic pentameter is the most common, probably entering the language through Chaucer in imitation of his Italian inspirations before being mastered by Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser. John Milton’s Paradise Lost, most sonnets and an estimated three quarters of most everything else is written in iambic pentameter.[   ] Lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter are commonly known as blank verse (think of the plays of Shakespeare and the great works of Milton). If they rhyme, they are heroic couplets – think Pope or Dryden. Heroic couplets were perhaps overused in the 18th century to the point they’re now mostly used for comic effect, though Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire would be a notable exception." .