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First published 1987 by Oxford University Press as a
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Reissued as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 1998
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749–1832.
Faust, part one.
(Oxford world’s classics)
Translation of: Faust, 1. Theil.
I. Luke, David, 1921– . II. Title. III. Title:
Faust, part 1. IV. Series.
PT2026.F2L85 1987 832′.6 87–1559
ISBN–13: 978–0–19–283595–6
ISBN–10: 0–19–283595–5
11
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Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Faust Part One
Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
DAVID LUKE
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
FAUST
PART ONE
JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE was born in 1749, the son of a well-to-do citizen of Frankfurt. As a young man he studied law and briefly practised as a lawyer, but creative writing was his chief concern. In the early 1770s he was the dominating figure of the German literary revival, his tragic novel Werther bringing him international fame.
In 1775 he settled permanently in the small duchy of Weimar where he became a minister of state and director of the court theatre; in 1782 he was ennobled as ‘von Goethe’. His journey to Italy in 1786–8 influenced the development of his mature classical style; in the 1790s, he and his younger contemporary Schiller (1759–1805) were the joint architects of Weimar Classicism, the central phase of German literary culture.
Goethe wrote in all the literary genres but his interests extended far beyond literature and included a number of scientific subjects. Faust, written at various stages of his life and in a variety of styles, became a constantly enlarged repository of his personal wisdom. His creative energies never ceased to take new forms and he was still writing original poetry at the age of more than 80. In 1806 he married Christiane Vulpius (1765–1816), having lived with her for eighteen years; they had one surviving son, August (1789–1830). Goethe died in 1832.
DAVID LUKE was an Emeritus Student (Emeritus Fellow) of Christ Church, Oxford. He published articles and essays on German literature, and various prose and verse translations, including Goethe’s Selected Verse, Stifter’s Limestone and Other Stories, Kleist’s The Marquise of O and Other Stories, Selected Tales by the brothers Grimm, Goethe’s Iphigenia in Tauris and Hermann and Dorothea, and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and Other Stories. His translation of Faust Part One was awarded the European Poetry Translation Prize in 1989. His translation of Goethe’s Erotic Poems is also available in Oxford World’s Classics.
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction
Synopsis of the composition of Faust Part One
Select Bibliography
Chronology
FAUST, PART ONE
Explanatory Notes
For Lawrence Brown
PREFACE
The present translation is from Faust, der Tragödie erster Teil, which Goethe published in 1808. I have used the edition by L. J. Scheithauer (Reclams Universal-Bibliothek, Stuttgart, revised 1986) which is itself based on the monumental ‘Weimarer Ausgabe’, the historical-critical edition of Goethe’s writings by E. Schmidt and other authorities (Weimar 1887–1919; Faust / in vol. 14). I have also consulted this edition and the text and annotations in certain others, such as that by Erich Trunz (in the ‘Hamburger Ausgabe’ of Goethe’s works, vol. 3, 1949) and that by Ernst Beutler in vol. 5 (1953) of the Zürich ‘Gedenkausgabe’. Goethe’s text has been transmitted by these and other standard modern editions virtually without variation or dispute. The prehistory or ‘Entstehungsgeschichte’, however, of this 1808 version of his Faust drama (that is, the process of its development from earlier fragmentary conceptions) is a more significant and complex matter, necessarily affecting any interpretation of the work and especially of this ‘first part’, which Goethe composed at intervals over a period of more than thirty years. This fundamental genetic problem is discussed in the Introduction, which is followed by a diagrammatic synopsis (pp. lvi f.). Additionally I have entered the abbreviations used in this synopsis (‘UR’, ‘FRA’, and ‘F.I’) alongside the text itself; these inform the reader to which of the widely separated ‘phases of composition’ any particular passage, or its unrevised equivalent, originally belonged.
Matters of detail and miscellaneous points requiring explanation or comment are dealt with in the Notes, on pp. 149–76, to which the asterisks in the text refer. The line-numbering of the English text corresponds to that of the German throughout. For convenience of reference I have also numbered the scenes (1–28), though this is not done by Goethe.
Special thanks are due to the Rockefeller Foundation for generously enabling me to spend a month in 1985 at its study-centre in Be
llagio during work on this edition.
D.L.
INTRODUCTION
THE legend of Faust grew up in the sixteenth century, an age of renewal and rebirth in Germany and Europe, a time of transition between medieval and modern culture. Goethe’s Faust was conceived in the 1770s, when his own creativity in its first flower was giving a new impetus to the German literary revival, and when as in the later eighteenth century generally Europe stood at a turning-point between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Faust could thus hardly fail to become something like a myth of European man, as well as a myth of the young poet’s own development. It is certainly his most famous single work, regarded both in and outside Germany as—along with his poetry—the most characteristic product of his genius. Both it and the poems did indeed have a certain centrality in his long creative career, which extended (if we disregard its first immature phase) from 1770 until his death in 1832. The poems are central in the fairly simple sense that, during these sixty years or so, he never really ceased writing them or developing as a poet, the result being a corpus of lyric and other shorter poems which is even now commonly underestimated in its range and complexity, far exceeding as it does the relatively small collection of texts that have been familiarized internationally by the great composers. Faust also, which is the work of a poet at least as much as of a dramatist, may be said to have accompanied Goethe through his life (Part One until he was in his fifties, Part Two mainly much later) though not, of course, in the sense that he was constantly preoccupied with it. He wrote it at intervals over the sixty years, in four clearly distinguishable and widely separated phases—short periods of creative work on a project which, as we might therefore expect and as Goethe himself conceded, turned out to be something rather less than unitary in its conception or homogeneous in its execution. We must here leave aside the complex question of whether the posthumously published ‘Part Two’ can properly be regarded, or was even strictly intended, as a completion of Part One or anything other than a rather tenuously connected sequel to it; to divide the whole work into two parts was in any case certainly not Goethe’s original plan. As it is, we are here confronted with the extraordinary and unique phenomenon of ‘Part One’ itself, about which there are problems enough. It was begun when Goethe was in his early twenties, then set aside unpublished for about fifteen years, then revised and slightly extended (though also cut) for publication in this incomplete form (Faust. A Fragment, 1790) in the first edition of his collected works; then perhaps even abandoned as a project before being taken up again when he was nearly 50. In this third phase of composition, mainly from June 1797 to April 1801, it was enlarged very significantly; Goethe then lost interest in it again for a few years, but decided in 1805 to publish nearly all he had done so far, as a ‘first part’. After further revisions and some delay due to external causes, this appeared in 1808 as Faust. The First Part of the Tragedy. A few scenes for Part Two had also been sketched at the turn of the century, but a long period of abandonment or latency now followed. Part Two, the in many ways very different continuation (and its differences rather than its links with Part One are what Goethe’s own recorded comments emphasize), belongs essentially to the last years of his life (fourth phase of composition, 1825–31) and in accordance with his wish was first delivered to the bemused public in 1832 when he was safely in his grave.
The whole complex poetic drama or dramatic poem, which defies all normal categories in both form and content, thus combines a number of genetically disparate elements into an extraordinary and puzzling synthesis. Its poetic vitality is undeniable and probably only enhanced by its stylistic diversity and what Goethe himself called its ‘fragmentariness’ and ‘incommensurability’. But ever since his own lifetime the history of Faust criticism has been that of a controversy between two methods. One is the historical or genetic approach which emphasizes the discrepancies, inconsistencies, or incongruities in the text and is content to explain them in terms of the long and complicated process of composition and Goethe’s changes of plan or sheer forgetfulness in the course of it. The other is the ‘unitarian’ insistence that the work must be assumed to be an integrated dramatic whole, sprung from a single and unvarying conception, and that any apparent contradictions may be resolved by sufficiently ingenious argument, or shown to be unimportant matters of detail. The controversy has a certain similarity to the disputes that have arisen in the last century or two from the application of historical scholarship to the Bible. At its most extreme, geneticism tears Faust to pieces and leaves the reader wondering why this is accounted a masterpiece of world dramatic literature at all; at its worst, the unitarian special pleading becomes an exercise in perverse piety and blindness to textual and biographical fact. A balanced approach will wish to credit the poem with at least a profound human and personal unity and to see its creation as a kind of organic growth: at each stage of revision and expansion, we must assume, Goethe respected what he had already written and indeed for the most part already published, but sought to develop and enlarge his earlier conception and so far as possible to integrate the old with the new. The analogy of a work of architecture built progressively at different periods is only partly appropriate; in Faust, the architect is always Goethe.
Whatever eventual critical synthesis we may try to achieve, however, the fact that Part One took him some thirty years to write is inescapable and demands to be taken into account. If as readers we are content with mere impressions, we may ignore this genetic process; otherwise we are under an obligation to be aware of it, in outline at least. Most of its main details are in fact well enough known. We should above all note, and distinguish from the rest of the poem, those parts of it which are based on its original core: this was the long unpublished, mysteriously fragmentary version of the early 1770s (written probably between 1772 and 1775, though certain scenes may go further back) which in Goethe studies is now always referred to as the ‘original Faust’ or Urfaust. Goethe later destroyed this manuscript, but by a sensational chance an unknown contemporary copy of it was discovered sixty-five years after his death and almost exactly a century ago (1887). This ‘Göchhausen transcript’, so called after the lady of the Weimar court circle who made it at some time in the late 1770s, is thought to be a substantially accurate copy of Goethe’s lost text, though we cannot of course know this for certain, and it is also possible that he had other Faust plans at that time of which the transcript contains no indication. Those parts of the final 1808 version which clearly correspond to this known pre-1775 nucleus, and most of which represent only slight revisions of the youthful material, comprise Faust’s opening soliloquy and conjuration of the Earth Spirit (lines 354–517), two episodic scenes of antiacademic satire (518–605, 1868–2050), the episodic tavern scene (2073–336), and above all the sequence (beginning with 2605 and ending with 4614, between which the 1808 text contains some later insertions) of comic, touching, and tragic scenes telling the story of Faust’s seduction and abandonment of Margareta (Gretchen) which so powerfully dominates the second half of Part One. Most of this Urfaust material has always more strongly appealed to both German and non-German readers than most of Goethe’s complex and sophisticated later additions; indeed, the Gretchen story especially, which was entirely the young Goethe’s invention and had no precedent in any earlier version of the Faust story, has exercised such imaginative fascination, and in particular so dominated theatrical productions and adaptations of the play throughout the nineteenth century, that the general public tends to associate Faust with the Gretchen affair almost to the exclusion of anything else.
The youthful Urfaust reflected the preoccupations not only of the youthful Goethe but of his generation. It has been said that if he had decided to publish it at the time, even in its fragmentary form, it might well have eclipsed the success and notoriety of his tragic first novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and possibly changed the whole course of German literary history. At the time of writing the Urfaust and Werther and his most fa
mous early poems, the young Goethe, born in 1749 and still living in his native city of Frankfurt, was a restless, rebellious, highly individualistic genius, the son of a well-to-do middle-class family and therefore in practice free (unlike any other German writer of his day) to devote himself chiefly to literature. He had taken a degree in law and briefly practised it, but never bound himself to the legal profession, nor had he yet settled into any permanent position or become beholden to a patron. His emergence as a miraculously original and almost at once internationally famous writer coincided with that upsurge or breakthrough in German literature which by a quirk of historical terminology came to be known as the ‘Storm and Stress’ period, but which in a wider world perspective may be seen as a precursory and provocative German form of European Romanticism. The young Goethe, indeed, may be said to have virtually invented this avant-garde movement single-handed. True, there had been pioneer theorists and essayists, notably the highly influential cultural historian and philosopher Herder (1744–1803) whose encounter with Goethe in 1770 was one of the turning-points in the latter’s development. There were about half-a-dozen minor writers, mostly dramatists, clustering round Goethe and treating him as a cult figure, but it was Goethe alone whose creative ‘genius’ (the word first became fashionable at this time) was not merely soi-disant—he alone who raised the values of eighteenth-century sentimentalism and early romanticism to a European level of literary expression. What is more, the Storm and Stress movement of the 1770s was Goethe’s own ‘Storm and Stress’ phase, just as the ‘Weimar Classicism’ of the 1790s corresponded to a maturer and so to speak ‘classical’ period in his life. German literary history lends itself to personalization, and so centrally pre-eminent in it is Goethe that in his time its stages were not so much reflected in and by his personal evolution, as rather vice versa: they reflected him, he virtually constituted them. In Goethe, German literature underwent a peculiar evolution from Storm and Stress to a new classicism or romantic-classical synthesis; and nowhere is this more succinctly documented than in the development, as we may trace it in the genesis of Part One, of his modern, highly personal yet historically momentous conception of the old Faust story. In this sense, too, Faust is a ‘central’ work, and for the same reason the genetic or ‘diachronic’ examination of it (as distinct from merely reading through the final text synchronically in the normal way) gains added interest, at least as a supplementary or introductory exercise.