Intellectually more demanding and ambitious are Thomas Mann’s last big novel, Doctor Faustus (1947), whose plot parallels the pre-Goethean story, but which also contains unmistakable imprints of Goethe’s Faust, and the 1981 motion picture Mephisto, loosely based on a novel concerned with the career and questionable morality of a German actor-director who achieved fame in his role of Mephisto. The film is a remarkable directorial accomplishment by Istvan Szabo.

The headlong strides in the natural sciences and in technology, the imperious reach for nature’s inmost secrets by twentieth-century “speculators of the elements” operating in computerized laboratories, the thrust toward man-made velocities that seemingly approach the impassable limits this side of omnipresence—can these not be seen as assaults on hitherto forbidden realms? In our day the search for the Augenblick is proceeding with increasing intensity. According to the Gospel of Luke, Satan showed to Jesus “all the kingdoms of the world in an instant of time” and then offered them to him; and it is not difficult to see in this second temptation a prefiguration of the Faustian wager, a “harking forward” to late-twentieth-century technological wizardry.

A Note on Using this eBook

In this eBook edition of Faust, you can switch between the English translation and the original German text. Throughout the eBook you will see hyperlinks—embedded in the titles, character names, and line numbers in the left columns—that allow you to click back and forth between the two versions while still holding your place.

A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

TO MAKE great poetry accessible by translation is a joy as well as a harsh discipline. The joy is of the kind that follows the completion of any difficult piece of work. The discipline and harsh constraints flow from the peculiar forces at play. On the one hand, there is the obligation to remain as close as possible to the original text and to avoid “irresponsible” departures from it. From that point of view, each recasting or remolding of the poet’s carefully chosen phrases can be judged to be a little betrayal.

The position at the other extreme has its source in the conviction that a good or faithful translation is only very rarely a literal transfer, that it is rather the transmigration of feeling, form, and thought from the imprecisions of one language to the quirks and coincidences of another.

It is important to give heed to both contrary impulses without entirely submitting to either, maintaining, wherever possible, a delicate balance between them. I have striven toward an ideal of a vital, rhythmic, American idiom so that the general impression might be similar to what a German reader might receive from the original. By relinquishing rhyme and strict meter, except in the interspersed songs and ballads, I gained the freedom to be more faithful to sense and spirit than I could otherwise have been. I believe that a consistent adherence to all the details of prosody cannot be sustained in a work of the scope of Faust without doing violence to natural diction. Moreover, it has for some time been clear to me that a German rhymed line is not necessarily rendered most felicitously—or most faithfully—by an equivalent English rhyme. Such a translation easily suffers from a jingling quality that may vitiate or even falsify the mood of the original.

The language of this translation is meant to be neither archaic nor wholly colloquial. Instead I tried to steer an intermediate course, in the hope of conveying a sense of the poetic immediacy and continual urgency of the German text.

This Bantam Faust was first published in 1962, was reissued in 1967, and now—more than twenty years after its first appearance—is being granted a new life. It is not very often that translators are given a second chance, and it is strangely illuminating—when reviewing the earlier version—to be conveyed into one’s own past and, as it were, to come face-to-face with one’s translating persona of an earlier day. There is a nervous “hello” and also a firm “good-bye.”

I feel inwardly connected to all those readers who came to Faust by way of my English version, and I am now tentatively confident that the changes in this new edition will further contribute to the understanding and enjoyment of one of the world’s supreme poetic works.

GOETHE CHRONOLOGY