Warwick's Reviews > Faust: Part One

The story of Faust is all over the place, and no wonder – what we have now is a strange mishmash of scenes Goethe wrote at various different times in his life, and later tried to jam together using Pritt-Stick and chewing-gum. If you approach it purely on the level of narrative, it seems pretty shaky.

The same could be said, of course, for some of Shakespeare's plays. What makes them interesting is the language and the ability of characters to speak so directly to the human condition – and that's really what's going on here as well. Except it's sort of like having the emotional younger Shakespeare of Falstaff in the same scene as the mature later Shakespeare of A Winter's Tale, because here you get stuff written by Goethe when he was young and full of Sturm und Drang histrionics rubbing shoulders with passages of middle-aged Classical even-handedness.

The earlier bits are the ones that seem most Goethe-like to me – grand self-reflexions full of high emotion and images of the natural world:

Bin ich der Flüchtling nicht? der Unbehauste?
Der Unmensch ohne Zweck und Ruh',
Der wie ein Wassersturz von Fels zu Felsen brauste
Begierig wütend nach dem Abgrund zu?

Which in the David Luke translation becomes:

Who am I? The unhoused, the fugitive,
The aimless, restless reprobate,
Plunging like some wild waterfall from cliff to cliff
Down to the abyss, in greedy furious spate!

Luke does a decent job, on the whole, of suggesting to English readers why Goethe's ‘play’ (really more of a long poem, though it does get staged, with various tactical omissions) is so especially important for German-speakers. Many of Luke's passages are extremely beautiful: the stately quatrains which make up the play's Dedication, and which end

Was ich besitze, seh' ich wie im Weiten,
Und was verschwand, wird mir zu Wirklichkeiten

…become in Luke's version,

All that I now possess seems far away
And vanished worlds are real to me today

…which I think is very good. Many of the most powerful monologues are also cleverly reorganised to be turned into natural-sounding English verse, and you can see why this translation won so many prizes when it came out in the 80s.

On individual lines, he is a bit less consistent. Most of the more famous lines in the play – Gefühl ist alles; Verweile doch! du bist so schön! – fortunately don't depend on too much poetic pizazz. Sometimes, though, Luke doesn't even really try. When the Earth Spirit in his version tells Faust, ‘You match the spirit you can comprehend,’ this hardly suggests the thickly assonant extravagance of the original Du gleichst dem Geist, den du begreifst.

This has always been the problem with Goethe, because his most characteristic feature is his mastery of the language, which is obviously not an easy thing to put across in a different one. For me, the best lines here are so wonderful because they capture something of the essence of how German works: as, for example, when Mephistopheles, complaining about Enlightenment rationalism, says, Den Bösen sind sie los, die Bösen sind geblieben, where all the distinction is compressed into that elegant variation in article, from den to die. (Luke has, ‘The Evil One / They're rid of, evil is still going strong’, which isn't particularly inspiring.)

And all this, of course, is only ‘Part One’! Goethe still couldn't leave it alone, and was adding to the second part (which I haven't yet read) until the year he died. The fact that Faust makes sense historically but not narratively, and poetically but not logically, is certainly a goldmine for critics; the Oxford World's Classics edition comes with two-page spider chart which attempts to untangle the various strands of Urfaust, Faust: A Fragment, and other esoteric stages in the writing process. In a sense these flaws are a feature – they leave enough space in the work for you to dream yourself into it. I hardly wanted to wake up.