Faust: A Tragedy, Part I

By Eugene Stelzig and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

Goethe is the most famous German author, and the poetic drama Faust, Part I (1808) is his best-known work, one that stands in the company of other leading canonical works of European literature such as Dante’s Inferno and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This is the first new translation into English since David Constantine’s 2005 version. Why another translation when there are several currently in print? To invoke Goethe’s own authority when speaking of his favorite author, Shakespeare, Goethe asserts that so much has already been said about the poet-dramatist “that it would seem there’s nothing left to say,” but adds, “yet it is the peculiar attribute of the spirit that it constantly motivates the spirit.” Goethe’s great dramatic poem continues to speak to us in new ways as we and our world continually change, and thus a new or updated translation is always necessary to bring to light Faust’s almost inexhaustible, mysterious, and enchanting poetic and cultural power. Eugene Stelzig’s new translation renders the text of the play in clear and crisp English for a contemporary undergraduate audience while at the same time maintaining its leading poetic features, including the use of rhyme. 

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Release date: Jul 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9781684481446

Book preview

I

INTRODUCTION

GOETHE, THE FAMOUS AUTHOR AND INTELLECTUAL POLYMATH

Henry Crabb Robinson, a young Englishman studying at the University of Jena at the beginning of the nineteenth century, reported to his brother in England that Göthe is the idol of the German literary public.¹ Even if today German pupils and students grow up largely in ignorance of Goethe’s work,² Goethe is still by far the most famous German author, and the plot and language of his most famous work, Faust, Part I, have long been embedded in the nation’s public imagination, with many phrases from the play having become proverbial in a manner similar to the impact of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the English-speaking world. Goethe’s life and works have been legendary for more than two centuries, from his romantic relationships with different women to his cryptic dying words at the age of eighty-two, more light. Over the course of his long and immensely productive life he was transformed in the German-speaking world from a flesh-and-blood individual into a cultural institution, a phenomenon that after his death, when his stature took on monumental proportions, accounts for the fact that the literary age in which he lived is known as die Goethezeit (the Age of Goethe). Thus it is not surprising that there have been anti-Goethe factions and critical potshots since his rise to literary celebrity in his twenties. The impulse to trash the canonical monument that is Goethe found a recent expression in a popular German film, Fuck You Goethe (2013), including a sequel, that has next to nothing to do with the poet but that reflects a playful iconoclastic attitude to the Most Famous German Author. And although Goethe’s massive impact persisted into twentieth-century German literature, as evident in Thomas Mann’s novel Doktor Faustus (1947), so did the iconoclastic animus, as wittily scripted in Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf (1927), in which the title character, the alienated outsider Harry Haller, attacks the pompous hagiographic portrait of a Salongoethe in a professor’s drawing room with his vanity and noble pose as a philistine bourgeois icon.³

When Goethe, born in 1749, began his literary career in the early 1770s in his native city of Frankfurt after having completed his law degree at Strasbourg, German authors, unlike those of Spain, Italy, England, and France, were hardly known beyond the German-speaking world, and German literature had no names that could match those of a Calderon, Cervantes, Dante, Petrarch, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Racine, Corneille, Voltaire, Rousseau. But young Goethe, more interested in literature than law, which he practiced for a short time and in a most desultory fashion while indulged by his wealthy patrician father, changed all that. He put German letters squarely on the map with his best seller, the epistolary and lyrical tour de force, The Sufferings of Young Werther (1774), written in a white heat in several weeks, that propelled the popular eighteenth-century letter novel made famous by Richardson (Pamela, 1740; Clarissa, 1748) and Rousseau (Julie, or the New Eloise, 1761) to a new and more concentrated level of intensity.⁴ Werther was a pan-European sensation, with an enormous popular impact. The tragic story of the sensitive and alienated young artist with an unsettled position in society who falls madly in love with a young woman (Lotte) already engaged to a decent and serious young man (Albert) with a promising civil service career, and who in the end commits suicide rather than accept that he cannot have his soul sister and idol of his heart, enthralled a broad reading public. It was reported that young men followed in Werther’s footsteps, ending their lives in the Werther uniform—the yellow vest and blue frock coat. Even Napoleon, the man of action and world conqueror, took the novel with him on campaign, and made a point of calling for an audience with the famous author when in 1806 his troops, after the battle of Jena, sacked the Duchy of Weimar, in which Goethe was living.

The novel that brought the young Goethe international renown is also the most famous work of the Storm and Stress (Sturm und Drang) movement of a new generation of young writers rebelling against a rigidly hierarchical world of social, political, and legal ossification of the nearly moribund Holy Roman Empire. They did so in the name of genius, spontaneity, nature, and passion. Bursting forth in the later eighteenth century as a nonpolitical form of literary protest, Sturm und Drang can also be seen as the unsettling opening notes of the Romantic movement that was to sweep across Europe and beyond for more than half a century. By the time Goethe emerged as its foremost exponent with Werther, he had already achieved national recognition for his historical drama, Goetz von Berlichingen, the Knight with the Iron Hand (1773), inspired by Shakespeare’s history plays and exuding the heady air of a new German national independence. Its title protagonist, an insurgent sixteenth-century nobleman whose memoirs Goethe had read, when faced with arrest by imperial forces, relays the famously blunt message to the captain that he can kiss my ass (er kann mich am Arsch lecken). Both these works break with literary conventions of style and decorum based on French Enlightenment models. These were felt to be an alien imposition on German literature and culture, though embraced by the most powerful German ruler, Frederick the Great of Prussia, who in his palace at Sanssouci at Potsdam preferred the French language, literature, culture, and fashion over the German. Just as the impassioned exclamations and lyrical effusions of Werther reach beyond and violate the neoclassical conventions of prose style, so does Goethe’s play break with the classical unities of time, place, and action.

These spirited works that brought Goethe fame by his mid-twenties and that helped to define his early career became more remote and alien to him by the time he reached middle age. After a two-year stay in Italy in his late thirties in whose wake he embraced a new objective ideal known as Weimar classicism, especially his status as the author of Werther—that powerful lyrical effusion of subjective feeling—came to be something of an embarrassment and even an albatross around his neck. He had long moved on, even as many of his readers and fans had not. But these early and spectacular literary successes also brought about a major and unexpected change in his life: his move to Weimar. The duchy’s new and young ruler, Duke Karl August—he was only eighteen—invited the famous author in 1775, when Goethe was twenty-six, for a visit and convinced him to stay on in what came to be known as one of Europe’s cultural centers in his Court of the Muses (Musenhof). Goethe stayed there, save for an extended sabbatical in Italy, for the remainder of his long life.

In the course of his multifaceted literary career, Goethe was probably more of a polymath than any other major author before or since. Beginning in early adolescence, he was a prolific poet in a variety of forms to almost the end of his days. In his twenties, he revolutionized German poetry, as his contemporary, Wordsworth, did in England at the end of the eighteenth century, with lyrical bursts of composition in a language much closer to that of real men than that of the rigidly formal registers of neoclassical German verse. Under the early influence of his friend, the philosopher and theologian Johann Gottfried Herder, he turned, like Coleridge and Wordsworth in their 1798 Lyrical Ballads, to folk sources for literary material. But Goethe also wrote a series of poetic dramas in the wake of Goetz, as well as prose fiction, including the two Wilhelm Meister novels that helped to establish the model of the Bildungsroman (novel of education) for the nineteenth century. He also authored an enigmatic relationship novel in his later years, The Elective Affinities (1809). In addition to many essays and prose pieces on a variety of topics, he wrote two major autobiographical works in his sixties and his seventies: the magisterial Poetry and Truth, which took the genre of literary life writing to a new level of sophistication that has not been surpassed since (possibly only equaled in the twentieth century by Nabokov in Speak, Memory), and the diaristic travelogue Italian Journey. And during his last years he managed to complete the long-delayed and in many ways arcane Faust, Part II, whose publication he reserved for posterity, and which he correctly foresaw would never have anything like the popularity of Part I. Despite Goethe’s enormous productivity in a variety of genres, however, only Werther and Faust have been enshrined as masterpieces in the pantheon of Western

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