Doktor Faustus - English Translations

English Translations

  • H. T. Lowe-Porter translated many of Mann's works, including Doctor Faustus, almost contemporaneously with their composition. Mann completed Doctor Faustus in 1947, and in 1948 Alfred A. Knopf published Lowe-Porter's English translation. The translator in her note remarked 'Grievous difficulties do indeed confront anyone essaying the role of copyist to this vast canvas, this cathedral of a book, this woven tapestry of symbolism.' She described her translation as 'a version which cannot lay claim to being beautiful, though in every intent it is deeply faithful.' She found a linguistic spirit comparable to Mann's intended authorial 'voice', and employed medieval English vocabulary and phrasing to correspond with those sections of the text in which characters speak in Early New High German.
  • John E. Woods' translation of 1997 is in a more modern vein, and does not attempt to mirror the original in this way.

Read more about this topic:  Doktor Faustus

Famous quotes containing the words english and/or translations:

    This seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since Milton wrote his Paradise Lost. But its antiquity is not the less great for that, for we do not regulate our historical time by the English standard, nor did the English by the Roman, nor the Roman by the Greek.... From this September afternoon, and from between these now cultivated shores, those times seemed more remote than the dark ages.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Woe to the world because of stumbling blocks! Occasions for stumbling are bound to come, but woe to the one by whom the stumbling block comes!
    Bible: New Testament, Matthew 18:7.

    Other translations use “temptations.”