THE LORD. As long as on the earth he lives,
So long it shall not be forbidden.
Man ever errs the while he strives.
MEPHISTOPHELES. My thanks to you; I’ve never hidden
An old distaste for dealing with the dead.
Give me a full-cheeked, fresh-faced lad! 320
A corpse with me is just no dice,
In this way I am like a cat with mice.
THE LORD. So be it; I shall not forbid it!
Estrange this spirit from its primal source,
Have licence, if you can but win it,
To lead it down your path by shrewd resource;
And stand ashamed when you must own perforce:
A worthy soul through the dark urge within it
Is well aware of the appointed course.
MEPHISTOPHELES. May be—but it has never lasted yet; 330
I am by no means worried for my bet.
And if I do achieve my stated perpent,
You grant me the full triumph that I covet.
Dust shall he swallow, aye, and love it,
Like my old cousin, the illustrious serpent.
What I find unsatisfactory here are the archaisms (‘ever’, ‘the while’, ‘aye’, and the word-order in 315 and 334) and especially their incongrous combination with racy contemporary colloquialisms (‘no dice’) or bizarre coinages (‘perpent’). In addition, ‘lad’ and ‘worthy soul’ have the wrong connotations, and ‘by no means worried for’ is lame as well as colloquial. Imperfect rhyme, though almost wholly alien to Goethe, is difficult to avoid altogether, and to my ear ‘lad’ rhyming with ‘dead’ is at least tolerable as prosody if not as diction, but ‘he strives’ rhyming with ‘he lives’, in so famous and crucial a line, is not, and both these rhymes can be improved quite easily. Arndt gives unnecessarily high priority to ending his lines on the same word as Goethe, and to end-stopped lines generally; I should have preferred not only to avoid the imperfect rhymes but also to acknowledge, by simply shifting it from the rhyme-position, that there is no acceptable rhyme for ‘serpent’. Moreover, although unlike Arndt I do not in general regard it as essential to preserve the exact order of Goethe’s rhymes, it is particularly important in this passage to imitate the striking effect in 327–35 where he uses only two rhymes in nine lines (in the German the sound -ust recurs four times and -ange five; a similar rhyme-flow is achieved in Mephistopheles’ later soliloquy, where the sound -eben is repeated six times in twelve lines, 1856–67). In my own version of the Prologue in Heaven passage (315–35) I have imitated this special effect and tried to steer round the other pitfalls, while also aiming at natural word-sequences and a broadly contemporary but suitable vocabulary. My rendering as ‘ancestress’ of Goethe’s now archaic word Muhme which in fact means cousin or aunt, is an instance of how an inessential detail of literal meaning may be sacrificed for what seems to be a more essential fidelity: in this case, to the nine-line flow of two rhymes.
One further short example is perhaps worth considering here. The first stanza of Dedication (a particularly intractable piece because of its prosodic strictness) ends with an instructive case of what Arndt calls the ‘filler’ word. Goethe here (lines 7 f.) writes:
Mem Busen fühlt sich jugendlich erschüttert
Vom Zauberhauch, der euren Zug umwittert.
Existing versions of this include the following:
Deep stirs my heart, awakened, touched to song,
As from a spell that flashes from your throng. (Wayne)
My breast is stirred and feels with youthful pain
The magic breath that hovers round your train. (Kaufmann)
I feel youth’s impulse grip my heart again
At the enchantment wafting from your train. (Passage)
What wafts about your train with magic glamour
Is quickening my breast to youthful tremor. (Arndt)
My own rendering, I suppose, is based on (or can with hindsight be analysed into) the following judgements: (1) umwittert is probably the filler-word chosen to rhyme with erschüttert. Its literal meaning suggests wind blowing about the ‘procession’ of youthful memories which Goethe is apostrophizing, perhaps carrying their scent; but this literal meaning is of secondary importance, and ‘waft’ is in any case a weak equivalent for it. (2) The literal meaning of Zug (procession, or less suitably ‘train’) is also secondary; the memories are drifting back insistently towards him, an idea already twice suggested earlier in the stanza by ihr naht euch (you draw near) and ihr drängt euch zu (you throng upon me), and it should suffice to suggest this by some such word as ‘besiege’. (3) The essential or primary elements in the sentence are jugendlich erschüttert (he feels rejuvenated and moved by deep nostalgia) and Zauberhauch (the memories come to him with magic force as if breathed into his heart by a gentle wind—a suggestion which umwittert merely reinforces. Accordingly my proposed version is:
(you …) who so
Besiege me, and with magic breath restore,
Stirring my soul, lost youth to me once more.
This loses certain details, but the gains include a natural word-flow and a congruous diction.
To pursue such comparative analyses further would be wearisome, but this much will serve to indicate the general guidelines I have adopted in the present translation. On the whole, except perhaps in certain important and much-quoted passages which seemed to require a closer hugging of the text, I have proceeded on the view that literalness is not the same thing as fidelity and can indeed even amount to its opposite. It can also militate against speakability, actability, and intelligibility. Goethe’s lines have all these qualities, though also much more. In the end we must acknowledge again the inherent hopelessness of the whole attempt to find an English equivalent for poetry of this order. Faust belongs to the German language as such, and to read its finest passages is to understand that no English will ever match the texture and flavour, the weight and density, the wit and magic of Goethe’s native words. What can translate the despairing romantic sensuousness of Faust’s plea to Gretchen in the final scene: Komm! komm! schon weicht die tiefe Nacht! (4506) or the naïve and terrible monosyllabic finality of her last words to him: Heinrich! Mir grant’s vor dir! (4610)? A translation must seek to stand by itself, but it must also point beyond itself, back and on to the original. In such an undertaking one may merely hope to avoid the worst faults, and be content if one can add something to the anglophone world’s understanding of the status of Faust as poetry and its potential as actable drama.
SYNOPSIS OF THE COMPOSITION OF FAUST PART ONE
This summary indicates to which composition-phase the various scenes and passages originally belong. The line-numerations in all three columns are those of the final version (‘F.I’); when in square brackets they represent only approximately equivalent passages. Earlier material incorporated into later versions usually underwent at least slight revision, as mentioned here in the more significant cases.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF FAUST
(The translations here chronologically listed are of Parts One and Two, and wholly or largely in rhymed verse, unless otherwise indicated.)
Bayard Taylor (London and Boston, 1871; Part Two 1876). Revised edn., Stuart Atkins (New York, 1962).
Theodore Martin (London, 1865; Part Two, New York 1886). Revised edn., W. H. Bruford, Everyman’s Library (London, 1954).
Philip Wayne, Penguin Books (London, 1949; Part Two 1959).
Louis MacNeice and E. L. Stahl (both parts abridged), Faber (London, 1951).
John Shawcross, Allan Wingate (London, 1959).
Walter Kaufmann, Part One with Act I, Sc. 1 and Act V of Part Two, with facing German text (New York, 1961).
Charles E. Passage, with introd. and commentary (New York, 1965).
Barker Fairley, prose (Toronto, 1970).
John Prudhoe, Part One (Manchester University Press, 1974).
Walter Arndt, ed. Cyrus Ha
mlin with introd., documentation, and commentary (New York, 1976).
Randall Jarrell, Part One, unrhymed verse (New York, 1976).
Stuart Atkins, unrhymed verse. Suhrkamp/Insel (Boston, 1984).
Robert David MacDonald (stage adaptation of both parts), Oberon Books (Birmingham, 1988).
II. ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF OTHER WORKS BY GOETHE
Poetry
Selected Verse, German text with prose tr. and introd., David Luke. Penguin Books (London, 1964; 21972, 31981).
West-Eastern Divan, tr. J. Whaley. Oswald Wolff (London, 1974).
Roman Elegies and The Diary, German texts with elegiac and ottava rima tr., David Luke, introd. H. R. Vaget. Libris (London, 1988).
Selected Poems, German text with verse tr., Michael Hamburger, Christopher Middleton, David Luke and others. Suhrkamp/Insel (Boston, 1982), Calder (London, 1983).
Hermann and Dorothea, hexameter verse tr., David Luke. Suhrkamp/Insel (New York, 1987).
Plays
Ironhand, a free adaptation of Götz von Berlichingen, John Arden. Methuen (London, 1965).
Egmont, tr. F. J. Lamport in Five German Tragedies, Penguin Books (London, 1969).
Torquato Tasso, verse tr. Alan Brownjohn, introd. T. J. Reed. Angel Books (London, 1985).
Iphigenia in Tauris, iambic verse tr. David Luke. Suhrkamp/Insel (New York, 1987).
Torquato Tasso, verse tr. Michael Hamburger. Suhrkamp/Insel (New York, 1987).
Novels
The Sorrows of Young Werther, tr. Victor Lange (New York, 1949).
Kindred by Choice (Die Wahlverwandtschaften), tr. H. M. Waidson. Calder (London, 1960).
Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandschaften), tr. Elizabeth Mayer and Louise Bogan (Chicago, 1965).
Elective Affinities, tr. R. J. Hollingdale. Penguin Books (London, 1971).
The Sorrows of Young Werther, tr. Elizabeth Mayer and Louise Bogan, foreword W. H. Auden (New York, 1971).
Wilhelm Meister (the Years of Apprenticeship and the Years of Travel), tr. H. M. Waidson, 6 vols. Calder (London, 1978–82).
Autobiography, etc.
Poetry and Truth (Dichtung und Wahrheit), tr. John Oxenford (as ‘The Autobiography of Goethe’, 1848), repr. Sidgwick and Jackson (London, 1971).
Conversations with Goethe in the Last Years of his Life, Eckermann, tr. John Oxenford (1850) repr. Everyman’s Library (London, 1930).
Letters from Goethe, tr. Marianne Herzfeld and C. A. M. Sym, introd. W. H. Bruford (Edinburgh University Press, 1957).
Conversations and Encounters (with Goethe), ed. and tr. David Luke and Robert Pick. Oswald Wolff (London, 1966).
Italian Journey, tr. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer. Penguin Books (London, 1970).
III. WORKS IN ENGLISH ON FAUST AND THE FAUST LEGEND
E. M. Butler, The Myth of the Magus (Cambridge University Press, 1948); The Fortunes of Faust (Cambridge University Press, 1952).
Barker Fairley, Goethe’s Faust. Six Essays. Clarendon Press (Oxford, 1953).
Eudo C. Mason, ‘Some conjectures regarding Goethe’s “Erdgeist” ‘in The Era of Goethe, essays presented to J. Boyd. Blackwell (Oxford, 1959).
Eudo C. Mason, ‘The “Erdgeist” controversy reconsidered’, Mod. Lang. Review, lv (1960).
Eudo C. Mason, ‘The Paths and Powers of Mephistopheles’ in German Studies presented to W. H. Bruford. Harrap (London, 1962).
The History of Doctor Johann Faustus (the 16th-century Faust chap-book), tr. and introd. H. G. Haile (Illinois University Press, 1965).
Eudo C. Mason, Goethe’s Faust. Its Genesis and Purport (University of California Press, 1967), mainly on Part One.
John R. Williams, Goethe’s Faust, Allen and Unwin (London, 1987).
IV. WORKS IN ENGLISH ON GOETHE
G. H. Lewes, The Life and Works of Goethe (London, 1855), repr. Everyman’s Library (London, 1949).
W. H. Bruford, Germany in the Eighteenth Century: The Social Background of the Literary Revival (Cambridge University Press, 1935, repr. 1952).
Humphrey Trevelyan, Goethe and the Greeks (Cambridge University Press, 1941, repr. 1981 with foreword by H. Lloyd-Jones).
Barker Fairley, A Study of Goethe, Clarendon Press (Oxford, 1947).
W. H. Bruford, Theatre, Drama and Audience in Goethe’s Germany, Routledge (London, 1950).
R. D. Gray, Goethe the Alchemist (Cambridge University Press, 1952).
Roy Pascal, The German Sturm und Drang (Manchester University Press, 1953).
Ronald Peacock, Goethe’s Major Plays (Manchester University Press, 1959).
W. H. Bruford, Culture and Society in Classical Weimar, 1775–1806 (Cambridge University Press, 1962).
E. M. Wilkinson, and L. A. Willoughby, Goethe. Poet and Thinker (essays), Edward Arnold (London, 1962).
Richard Friedenthal, Goethe. His Life and Times, Weidenfeld and Nicolson (London, 1965).
R. D. Gray, Goethe: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 1967).
Georg Lukács, Goethe and his Age (essays), Merlin Press (London, 1968).
T. J. Reed, ‘The Goethezeit and its Aftermath’ in Germany. A Companion to German Studies, ed. J. M. S. Pasley, Methuen (London, 1972).
Ilse Graham, Goethe: Portrait of the Artist, de Gruyter (Berlin & New York, 1977).
T.J. Reed, The Classical Centre. Goethe and Weimar 1775–1832, Croom Helm (London), Barnes & Noble (New York), 1980; Oxford University Press (1986).
T. J. Reed, Goethe, Past Masters series (Oxford University Press, 1984).
E. M. Wilkinson, T. J. Reed, and others, Goethe Revisited, essays, ed. E. M. Wilkinson, Calder (London), Riverrun Press (New York) 1984.
The Publications of the English Goethe Society, i–xii (1886–1912) and new series i– (1924 to date) contain articles on numerous aspects of Faust and Goethe; an index has also been provided by A. C. Weaver (Index to the P.E.G.S. 1886–1970 (Leeds, 1973)).
CHRONOLOGY
c.1480
Georg or Johann Faust born in? Knittlingen (d.c.1540).
1506–36
Faust mentioned occasionally in contemporary documents.
1548–85
Various reports of Faust’s legendary exploits.
1587
First known printed Faustbuch (Faust chapbook): Historix! of Doctor Johann Faust, the infamous magician and necromancer, published in Frankfurt by Johann Spies; anonymous, and thought to be based on a lost earlier version.
? 1592
Marlowe writes The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (first attested performance 1594, first known edition 1604).
1599
Second Faustbuch published in Hamburg, in the version by Georg Rudolf Widmann.
1608
First attested performance of Marlowe’s Faustus as a German popular play (in Graz).
1666
First attested Faust puppet-play (in Lüneburg).
1674
Third Faustbuch published in Nuremberg in the version by Nikolaus Pfitzer.
1725
Publication of the fourth Faustbuch ‘by one of Christian intent’ (History of the universally notorious arch-necromancer and sorcerer Doctor Johann Faust, his alliance with the Devil …); this was the version known to Goethe.
1749
Johann Wolfgang Goethe born in Frankfurt-am-Main (28 August).
1759
Lessing (1729–81) publishes in the seventeenth of his Letters concerning Contemporary Literature (but without claiming authorship) a scene from his projected and now lost dramatic version of the Faust story.
1765–8
Goethe studies at the University of Leipzig.
1768
The Faust play performed in Frankfurt by travelling players.
1768–70
Goethe in Frankfurt; Pietistic period, reading of cabbalistic literature.
1770
The Faust play performed in Strassburg by travelling players.
1770–1
Goethe at the University of Strassbu
rg; meeting with Herder (1744–1803); collects folk-songs and writes poems to Friederike Brion. First version of Götz von Berlichingen written in 1771 after Goethe’s return to Frankfurt.
1772
Execution (14 January) of Susanna Brandt for the murder of her illegitimate child.
? 1772
(possibly earlier): Goethe begins to write Faust (‘Urfaust’ phase of composition, till 1775).
1773
Publication of revised version of Götz von Berlichingen.
1774
Publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther.
1775
(November) Goethe arrives in Weimar at the invitation of the Duke Karl August (1757–1828).
c. 1775–6
Copy made by Fräulein von Göchhausen of the unpublished Faust manuscript.
1775–86
Goethe’s first Weimar years (ministerial duties, growing interest in the natural sciences, amitié amoureuse with Charlotte von Stein, end of ‘Storm and Stress’ phase, early versions of Iphigenia in Tauris, Wilhelm Meister and Torquato Tasso; 1782 Goethe ennobled by the Emperor Joseph II at Karl August’s request).
1786
(September) Goethe’s Italian journey (till June 1788).
1787
Publication of final (iambic) version of Iphigenia in Tauris.
1788
(February) Resumption of work on Faust (second phase of composition).
1788