...and the hill, and the big chain around
the trunk of the rare oak, Quercus ruslan Chat.
(2.7)
"Chat." probably hints at Chateaubriand; on the other hand,
chat is French for "cat." "In the extraordinary
lines, among his greatest, that Pushkin added in 1824, four years after its
publication, to the beginning of Ruslan and Lyudmila" (EO
Commentary, vol. Two, p. 139) the learned cat day and night walks
on a golden chain around the green oak:
U lukomor'ya dub zelyonyi;
Zlataya tsep' na dube tom:
i dnyom i noch'yu kot
uchyonyi
vsyo khodit po tsepi
krugom
(I don't have a copy of Verses and Versions in which,
I suspect, there would be VN's translation of these lines.)
Alexey Sklyarenko