Harry Hoyt, 96, packs Macculloch Hall for Russian book reading

Many kids have memories of dad reading the sports pages over breakfast.  The Hoyt household was a little different.

“I remember him trying to read War and Peace for a long time. He was trying to translate it. He seemed to do it at breakfast,”  Beth Bayles said of her father, Harry Hoyt.

Harry never quite finished War and Peace. (Has anyone?) But the retired lawyer did a crackerjack job translating Alexander Pushkin’s novel-in-verse, Eugene Onegin.  Harry’s reading of his self-published version drew such a crowd Sunday at Morristown’s Macculloch Hall and Historical Museum that organizers had to turn people away.

“Tell them to come over to my house and I’ll give another reading,” joked Harry, whose fastball still shows plenty of zip at age 96.

He credits his longevity to a heart attack, among other things. It made him quit smoking and drinking years ago.

LISTEN TO MORE OF HARRY’S TIPS FOR A LONG, HAPPY LIFE

Harry’s fascination with the Russian language began in World War II. Stationed in Canada with time to kill, he took a course from a non-commissioned officer of Russian ancestry. Later, Harry, who holds degrees from Harvard and Yale, took some night classes at Morristown High School.

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Along the way, he paid two visits to the former Soviet Union–earning him a visit from the CIA.  More recently, he studied Italian and Spanish, just for fun.

“Don Enrique was an excellent student,” said Harry’s former Spanish teacher at the County College of Morris, Cristina Lambert. She referred to him by his name in the class.

It took Enrique, er, Harry, about a decade to complete his translation of Eugene Onegin, a tragic love story. He carried around stacks of index cards, scribbling Russian passages on one side and his English version on the other.

A Russian dictionary and a copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s translation never were far away.

Harry chose this particular work because it’s by the “Russian Shakespeare,” and because the poem is more concise than a novel like Tolstoy’s War and Peace. He felt prior translations botched the music of Pushkin’s prose by trying to force awkward English rhymes.  So his translation is rhyme-free–except for a few “accidents” that he humorously pointed out during the reading.

“It was remarkable…he made it come alive,” said retired Judge Kenneth MacKenzie, who has seen Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin but has not read the original novel.

Harry sold quite a few copies of his translation to an audience that included some family (which includes six children, 11 grandchildren and eight grandchildren at last count) and a contingent from the Morristown Rotary, of which Harry, a former alderman, remains an active member.

He donated proceeds to Macculloch Hall.

And he sang the praises of digital publishing–not bad for a guy whose boyhood bogeyman was Kaiser Wilhelm.

“Nowadays, anyone who wants to can publish a book,” Harry told his new fans. “With print-on-demand, you don’t have to print a lot of books and put them in the garage and let them rot there.”