Faust I & II

johann wolfgang von goethe stuart atkins

Goethe's most complex and profound work, Faust was the effort of the great poet's entire lifetime. Written over a period of sixty years, it can be read as a document of Goethe's moral and artistic development. As a drama drawn from an immense variety of cultural and historical material, set in a wealth of poetic and theatrical traditions, it can be read as the story of Western humanity striving restlessly and ruthlessly for progress.

Faust is made available to the English reader in a completely new translation that communicates both its poetic variety and its many levels of tone. The language is present-day English, and Goethe's formal and rhythmic variety is reproduced in all its richness. With stylistic ease the translation conveys both the sense and the tonal range of the German original without recourse to archaisms or to interpretive elaborations. A short essay affords the reader an understanding of Goethe's considerations as he composed the drama in the course of six decades, and the notes elucidate allusions that may be obscure to an English reader and indicate the significance of metrical features of the text.

This book is part of a projected twelve-volume paperback series that brings into modern English a reliable translation of a representative portion of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's vast body of work. Selected from over 140 volumes in German, this edition is the new standard in English and contains poetry, drama, fiction, memoir, criticism, and scientific writing. The twelve volumes are also available in hardcover, individually or as a set, through Princeton University Press.

Genres classicsfictionpoetryplaysgerman literaturedramaliteraturephilosophyfantasygermany

329 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,1832

Series

Goethes Faust

This edition

Format: 329 pages, Paperback
Published: July 5, 1994 by Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691036564
ASIN: 069103656X
Language: English

About the author

johann wolfgang von goethe

A master of poetry, drama, and the novel, German writer and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe spent 50 years on his two-part dramatic poem Faust, published in 1808 and 1832, also conducted scientific research in various fields, notably botany, and held several governmental positions.

George Eliot called him "Germany's greatest man of letters... and the last true polymath to walk the earth." Works span the fields of literature, theology, and humanism.
People laud this magnum opus as one of the peaks of world literature. Other well-known literary works include his numerous poems, the Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and the epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther.

With this key figure of German literature, the movement of Weimar classicism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries coincided with Enlightenment, sentimentality (Empfindsamkeit), Sturm und Drang, and Romanticism. The author of the scientific text Theory of Colours, he influenced Darwin with his focus on plant morphology. He also long served as the privy councilor ("Geheimrat") of the duchy of Weimar.

Goethe took great interest in the literatures of England, France, Italy, classical Greece, Persia, and Arabia and originated the concept of Weltliteratur ("world literature"). Despite his major, virtually immeasurable influence on German philosophy especially on the generation of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, he expressly and decidedly refrained from practicing philosophy in the rarefied sense.

Influence spread across Europe, and for the next century, his works inspired much music, drama, poetry and philosophy. Many persons consider Goethe the most important writer in the German language and one of the most important thinkers in western culture as well. Early in his career, however, he wondered about painting, perhaps his true vocation; late in his life, he expressed the expectation that people ultimately would remember his work in optics.