Goethe's Faust - Translations

Translations

In 1821, a partial English verse translation of Faust (Part One) was published anonymously by the London publisher Thomas Boosey and Sons, with illustrations by the German engraver Moritz Retzsch. This translation was attributed to the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Frederick Burwick and James C. McKusick in their 2007 Oxford University Press edition, Faustus: From the German of Goethe, Translated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In a letter dated 4 September 1820, Goethe wrote to his son August that Coleridge was translating Faust. However, this attribution is controversial: Harold Bloom observes "As a sexual nightmare or erotic fantasy, it has no rival, and one understands why the shocked Coleridge declined to translate the poem".

In 1828, at the age of twenty, Gérard de Nerval published a French translation of J.W. von Goethe's Faust, which given his young age and the complexity of the text is regarded as a remarkable feat, all the more so considering the praise it received from the German author himself.

In 1870–71, Bayard Taylor published an English translation in the original metres.

In 1887 the Irish dramatist William Gorman Wills loosely adapted the first part of Faust for a production starring Henry Irving as Mephistopheles at the Lyceum Theatre, London.

Philosopher Walter Kaufmann was also known for an English translation of Faust.

In August 1950, Boris Pasternak's Russian language translation of the first part led him to be attacked in the Soviet literary journal Novy Mir. The attack read in part,

"... the translator clearly distorts Goethe's ideas... in order to defend the reactionary theory of 'pure art' ... he introduces an aesthetic and individualist flavor into the text... attributes a reactionary idea to Goethe... distorts the social and philosophical meaning..."

In response, Pasternak wrote to the exiled daughter of Marina Tsvetayeva,

"There has been much concern over an article in Novy Mir denouncing my Faust on the grounds that the gods, angels, witches, spirits, the madness of poor Gretchen, and everything 'irrational' has been rendered much too well, while Goethe's 'progressive' ideas (what are they?) have been glossed over. But I have a contract to do the second part as well! I don't know how it will all end. Fortunately, it seems that the article won't have any practical effect."