Both parts also became available as sound recordings, Part One being particularly notable for the incomparable performance of Käthe Gold as Gretchen.

The notorious difficulty of translating Faust into any language is reflected in the history of attempts to put it into English. Of Part One alone, or of parts of it, there have been between fifty and a hundred English versions since it was first published in 1808, and the dust lies thick on most of them. The Bibliography gives details of some which have appeared on both sides of the Atlantic in the last forty years or so, and of one or two of the earlier ones. The existence of so many predecessors may well daunt the newcomer to this Sisyphean task, though paradoxically it is also encouraging: when the other versions are actually examined, the stimulus to try to do it differently is almost irresistible. Faust himself, we may hope, entertained no disrespect for his colleague and contemporary Martin Luther when he too felt this challenge and decided ‘Ich muß es anders übersetzen’ (1227 f.). It is true that his career as a translator was shortlived: having considered three alternative renderings of his first five words he was interrupted by the Devil and promptly sold himself to him. In the beginning was the Word, and what have translators made of it? The intractability of the problem arises, I would suggest, from the constant conflict between three absolute requirements: (1) that a poem such as Faust, having been written almost entirely in rhymed verse, must be translated (even in the late twentieth century) into rhymed verse; (2) that it must nevertheless be translated into an English of the twentieth century and not of the nineteenth or earlier; and (3) that the essential elements of Goethe’s meaning must be conveyed without significant distortion. In the present enterprise I have rightly or wrongly treated all three of these propositions as self-evident, though they are perhaps in need of some further clarification.

On the question of rhyme I emphatically agree in principle with those translators (now, it seems, increasingly unfashionable) who have reproduced it throughout, and fundamentally disagree with those who have abandoned it altogether or used it only intermittently. If one is trying to offer something like an autonomous English ‘equivalent’ of Goethe’s text, and not merely the utilitarian reading-aid that may be appropriate to a bilingual edition, then one stands inescapably under formal demands similar—though they are less strict—to those imposed by Dante’s Divine Comedy or Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Dante has been put into English terza rima more than once with considerable virtuosity; as to Pushkin, Charles Johnston’s prosodically meticulous and linguistically brilliant rendering of his relentlessly regular complex stanzas must surely stand as a model of what verse translation should and may rarely be. Goethe’s schemes of rhyme and metre in most of Faust are more fluid and flexible, and some liberties may be taken with them, but they are still of the essence of the poem and must be imitated as closely as other considerations will allow. To use prose, or the kind of flat rhymeless verse which is tantamount to prose, is simply a counsel of despair, an evasion of the main technical challenge. Half the point of what Goethe says is lost if it lacks the musical closure and neatness of the way he said it. As Walter Arndt succinctly puts it in the introductory essay to his strictly rhymed version: ‘(the rhyme) is part of the “meaning” and the “meaning” is part of it… Fidelity and prose are mutually exclusive goals.’ Where one may differ is in some of the detailed applications of this fundamental principle. For example—given that English contains far fewer ‘feminine’ word-endings than German or Russian, to say nothing of Italian—it seems to me neither possible nor desirable to conform to Goethe’s regular alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes, even in a prosodically strict passage such as the ottava rima stanzas of Dedication (1–32). (A similar point is made by Walter Kaufmann, who also uses predominantly masculine rhyming.) In addition, I have used far fewer end-stopped lines than Goethe, and have not often (except, again, in a piece such as Dedication) arranged the rhymes in exactly the same sequence as in the original or used exactly the same line-lengths. To eschew these licences—that of fairly frequent overrunning, for example—seems to me to increase the difficulty of rhyming to a point at which too much else has to be sacrificed for the sake of it; rhyme becomes, so to speak, too expensive.

This question of the cost of rhyme, of how expensive a luxury one is prepared to allow it to become, is one that constantly arises, and the answer must be a matter of personal judgement. The difficulty is created by the other two axiomatic constraints mentioned above, one of which is that of language and diction. Goethe’s language was not archaic to his contemporaries, and it is absurd to translate it today into poetic archaisms. The insidious pervasiveness of archaic sub-Shakespearian diction in English verse is even now very hard to resist altogether, but we should continue to try harder—asking ourselves, for instance, as a constant routine test: how would this word, or this phrase, sound to a present-day audience in the mouth of a present-day actor? If we answer that to either of them it would probably sound even slightly laughable, then like Faust himself we must try another word (or another phrase, another arrangement). Our imaginary actor should not only not be asked to say ‘methinks’ as an equivalent of mich dünkt, or to use ‘thou’ and ‘ye’ for the du and ihr which modern German has been fortunate enough to preserve: we should also not expect him to talk constantly in dustily poetic inversions (the adjective following the noun, for instance, or the negative following the verb). At the other extreme, however, we should avoid up-to-the-minute, rapidly dating colloquial jocularities and obtrusive neologisms. The diction should be kept in a broad, quasi-timeless middle ground between the pallidly antiquated and the brashly modish. Worst of all is the incongruous mixture of the two. Better a discreet neutrality than the sudden jolt from one century to another, or from one register to another. The adage about art concealing art must mean, in this context, that it should ideally be made impossible for the reader of a rhyme-pair to guess which word was chosen to rhyme with which. If he can, then the chances are that the rhyme is too obtrusive, it has probably cost too much.

We come here to the problem of the third constraint, that of fidelity to the meaning—that is, to what I have advisedly called the essential meaning. Arndt, in this connection, is surely right in suggesting that in the technical process of creating rhymed verse, many words or phrases are not so much primary ends in themselves as ‘acceptable fillers’, co-opted into the poet’s scheme for prosodic reasons. This seems to amount to a distinction between the primary semantic or expressive values in any given line or passage and its secondary or incidental details which have entered into combination with the main substance in one way or another. A translator’s decision as to which elements are primary and which are secondary in any particular case will be a matter for his spontaneous aesthetic judgement.