Faust: First Part Read online

  We have from Goethe himself a number of observations that may be regarded as relevant to this point and to the question of the ‘unity’ of Faust in general. Many of them date, as we have seen, from the summer of 1797 when he resumed work on Part One. A further such comment, probably also written at that time, was a nine-line verse epigram which he intended to place at the end of the play under the title Curtain Speech (Abkündigung), a counterpart to the Prelude on the Stage as the poet’s Valediction would have been to Dedication. The actor was to call for applause, remarking:

  … Our play is rather like the life of Man:

  We make a start, we make an end—

  But make a whole of it? Well, do so if you can.

  (Des Menschen Leben ist ein ähnliches Gedicht: es hat wohl einen Anfang, hat ein Ende, allein ein Ganzes ist es nicht.) Later, Goethe planned that this apologia should appear at the end of Part Two; in the event, like Valediction, it was left unpublished. But as we have already seen, Goethe conceded to Schiller at the time of finishing Part One that Faust could never claim to be an integral whole: ‘the whole thing (das Ganze) will always remain a fragment’ (27 June 1797); and it is noticeable how often he reverted to this point later on, especially in his last years when he was engaged on Part Two. The words ‘fragment’, ‘fragmentary’, and especially ‘incommensurable’, turn up repeatedly, referring specifically to Part Two but probably applicable to Part One as well: ‘(I intended) the Second Part… to be less fragmentary than the first’ (? 1830/1, reported by Riemer); ‘the more incommensurable and elusive to the understanding a work of literature is, the better it is’ (conversation with Eckermann, 6 May 1827); ‘Faust is really a quite incommensurable quantity, and all attempts to make it rationally intelligible are vain’ (Eckermann, 3 January 1830). To Eckermann, as to Schiller, he declares: ‘In a work of this kind all that matters is that the individual component parts (die einzelnen Massen) should be meaningful and clear, although it will always be incommensurable as a whole—while nevertheless for that very reason remaining, like an unsolved problem, a constant stimulus to repeated study’ (13 February 1831). The actor’s valediction of 1800, by its choice of simile, made a further point: the poem, the drama, is like human life itself. It has been said of Goethe that fragmentariness was of the essence of his genius; also, that his poetry and his life were close to each other, as in a kind of symbiosis. The two points are related, as he himself seems to suggest by the much-quoted remark in his autobiography (Poetry and Truth, Book VII) that all his works are ‘fragments of a great confession’. The description applies pre-eminently to Faust. It does not mean, of course, that all his works were themselves fragmentary. His shorter poems have their own kind of integrity and perfection, and some of his longer works as well (Hermann and Dorothea, Iphigenia, Tasso) have a classical unity or something closely approaching it. But if we look for dramaturgical and logical integration in Faust we shall be disappointed. Little purpose is served by crediting a work with qualities which its author himself disclaims. Most of the ‘component parts’ are of great interest in themselves or have great comic or tragic force; as a whole it is a fascinatingly flawed masterpiece. It seems to have had for Goethe the special status of a kind of creative sideshow, to which (as he wrote to Schiller) the highest formal principles were not to be scrupulously applied. On the other hand, the fact that it remained, at each stage of its composition, close to his own life, documenting his current interests, an evolving and unfinished ‘confession’, a poetic extension of his organic growth so to speak, could not fail to give it a certain vitality, an endlessly stimulating variety and freshness. Faust is not so much a structure as a complex of structures, the drama not of one human problem but of a whole human development. Above all it is a generous and kaleidoscopic profusion of wit and poetry.

  As a work for the theatre, even Part One was generally regarded during its author’s lifetime as unperformable, though it was widely read. Goethe himself seemed to think it unsuitable for the stage, though his recorded pronouncements on this point are ambiguous. A production in Weimar was planned in 1810 but came to nothing. There were amateur or private performances of excerpts from the text, but the first full-length production of Part One in Germany by a professional company was in 1829, in Goethe’s eightieth year and more than twenty years after its publication (strangely enough, a French premiere in Paris and even an English one in London, with accompanying fireworks, had been given a year or two earlier). The German première was at the Brunswick court theatre, produced by August Klingemann in an eight-act arrangement which was then quickly adopted in several other German cities. After this Part One continued to be performed, though always in adaptations which virtually reduced the text to the Gretchen tragedy. Gounod’s opera of 1859 (often more correctly known in Germany not as Faust but as Margarete) reflects this conception and gave still wider currency to it. It was not until the last quarter of the century that German producers began to offer completer versions of Part One and to combine it with Part Two. The latter, published just after Goethe’s death in 1832, had from the first been received with incomprehension, and only selected fractions of it had been performed; a few scenes were given in 1849 in honour of Goethe’s centenary, and even in the so-called première of 1854, in Hamburg, the greater part of the text was cut. Not until 1876, in Weimar, did Otto Devrient put on the first production of both Parts, on two successive evenings. This was the year of the opening of the Bayreuth Festival, and indeed the influence of Wagner’s unprecedently long operas, particularly the Ring tetralogy, is said to have encouraged producers to attempt full-scale multi-evening presentations of Faust. Dingelstedt of the Vienna Burgtheater planned to give one in Bayreuth itself, and in fact his successor Wilbrandt did so in Vienna in 1883; four-evening versions were given in 1877 in Hanover and in 1900 in Berlin. But theatrically speaking, neither Part One nor Part Two really came into its own until the twentieth century, in the hands of the great post-Naturalistic director Max Reinhardt. His 1909 production of Part One in Berlin was still a Faust-Gretchen version, but innovative by its use of the revolving stage; Part Two followed in 1911. In 1917 Reinhardt became, with Hofmannsthal and Strauss, a co-founder of the Salzburg Festival, and it was in his last years here, between 1933 and 1937, that he realized an extended and more integrated conception of Part One. His use of a vast, specially constructed ‘simultaneous’ stage in the Felsenreitschule was an achievement of genius, and his Faust productions became internationally famous. With the Second World War the Reinhardt era passed, and the Gustav Gründgens era began. Gründgens had first played the part of Mephistopheles (coveted by star actors even in Goethe’s day) in 1932, and his first productions of Parts One and Two were in 1941 and 1942 respectively. A newly conceived version followed in Düsseldorf in 1949, and this developed into his revolutionary and now legendary Hamburg productions of 1957 (Part One) and 1958 (Part Two). Gründgens, taking a hint from the Prelude on the Stage which he had previously always cut but now reread, abandoned all the traditional illusion-making paraphernalia of realism and presented everything—the heavens, the Imperial court, Greece—as nothing but the stage itself, the play as a play, with boards and a few simple properties, just as a troupe of wandering players might have done it. His conception and his own acting won international acclaim, with guest performances in the United States and the Soviet Union. Gründgens had Part One made into a film in 1961, simply as a record of his stage version and without any exploitation of the film medium as such. Both parts also became available as sound recordings, Part One being particularly notable for the incomparable performance of Käthe Gold as Gretchen.

  The notorious difficulty of translating Faust into any language is reflected in the history of attempts to put it into English. Of Part One alone, or of parts of it, there have been between fifty and a hundred English versions since it was first published in 1808, and the dust lies thick on most of them. The Bibliography gives details of some which have appeared on both sides of the Atlantic in
the last forty years or so, and of one or two of the earlier ones. The existence of so many predecessors may well daunt the newcomer to this Sisyphean task, though paradoxically it is also encouraging: when the other versions are actually examined, the stimulus to try to do it differently is almost irresistible. Faust himself, we may hope, entertained no disrespect for his colleague and contemporary Martin Luther when he too felt this challenge and decided ‘Ich muß es anders übersetzen’ (1227 f.). It is true that his career as a translator was shortlived: having considered three alternative renderings of his first five words he was interrupted by the Devil and promptly sold himself to him. In the beginning was the Word, and what have translators made of it? The intractability of the problem arises, I would suggest, from the constant conflict between three absolute requirements: (1) that a poem such as Faust, having been written almost entirely in rhymed verse, must be translated (even in the late twentieth century) into rhymed verse; (2) that it must nevertheless be translated into an English of the twentieth century and not of the nineteenth or earlier; and (3) that the essential elements of Goethe’s meaning must be conveyed without significant distortion. In the present enterprise I have rightly or wrongly treated all three of these propositions as self-evident, though they are perhaps in need of some further clarification.

  On the question of rhyme I emphatically agree in principle with those translators (now, it seems, increasingly unfashionable) who have reproduced it throughout, and fundamentally disagree with those who have abandoned it altogether or used it only intermittently. If one is trying to offer something like an autonomous English ‘equivalent’ of Goethe’s text, and not merely the utilitarian reading-aid that may be appropriate to a bilingual edition, then one stands inescapably under formal demands similar—though they are less strict—to those imposed by Dante’s Divine Comedy or Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Dante has been put into English terza rima more than once with considerable virtuosity; as to Pushkin, Charles Johnston’s prosodically meticulous and linguistically brilliant rendering of his relentlessly regular complex stanzas must surely stand as a model of what verse translation should and may rarely be. Goethe’s schemes of rhyme and metre in most of Faust are more fluid and flexible, and some liberties may be taken with them, but they are still of the essence of the poem and must be imitated as closely as other considerations will allow. To use prose, or the kind of flat rhymeless verse which is tantamount to prose, is simply a counsel of despair, an evasion of the main technical challenge. Half the point of what Goethe says is lost if it lacks the musical closure and neatness of the way he said it. As Walter Arndt succinctly puts it in the introductory essay to his strictly rhymed version: ‘(the rhyme) is part of the “meaning” and the “meaning” is part of it… Fidelity and prose are mutually exclusive goals.’ Where one may differ is in some of the detailed applications of this fundamental principle. For example—given that English contains far fewer ‘feminine’ word-endings than German or Russian, to say nothing of Italian—it seems to me neither possible nor desirable to conform to Goethe’s regular alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes, even in a prosodically strict passage such as the ottava rima stanzas of Dedication (1–32). (A similar point is made by Walter Kaufmann, who also uses predominantly masculine rhyming.) In addition, I have used far fewer end-stopped lines than Goethe, and have not often (except, again, in a piece such as Dedication) arranged the rhymes in exactly the same sequence as in the original or used exactly the same line-lengths. To eschew these licences—that of fairly frequent overrunning, for example—seems to me to increase the difficulty of rhyming to a point at which too much else has to be sacrificed for the sake of it; rhyme becomes, so to speak, too expensive.

  This question of the cost of rhyme, of how expensive a luxury one is prepared to allow it to become, is one that constantly arises, and the answer must be a matter of personal judgement. The difficulty is created by the other two axiomatic constraints mentioned above, one of which is that of language and diction. Goethe’s language was not archaic to his contemporaries, and it is absurd to translate it today into poetic archaisms. The insidious pervasiveness of archaic sub-Shakespearian diction in English verse is even now very hard to resist altogether, but we should continue to try harder—asking ourselves, for instance, as a constant routine test: how would this word, or this phrase, sound to a present-day audience in the mouth of a present-day actor? If we answer that to either of them it would probably sound even slightly laughable, then like Faust himself we must try another word (or another phrase, another arrangement). Our imaginary actor should not only not be asked to say ‘methinks’ as an equivalent of mich dünkt, or to use ‘thou’ and ‘ye’ for the du and ihr which modern German has been fortunate enough to preserve: we should also not expect him to talk constantly in dustily poetic inversions (the adjective following the noun, for instance, or the negative following the verb). At the other extreme, however, we should avoid up-to-the-minute, rapidly dating colloquial jocularities and obtrusive neologisms. The diction should be kept in a broad, quasi-timeless middle ground between the pallidly antiquated and the brashly modish. Worst of all is the incongruous mixture of the two. Better a discreet neutrality than the sudden jolt from one century to another, or from one register to another. The adage about art concealing art must mean, in this context, that it should ideally be made impossible for the reader of a rhyme-pair to guess which word was chosen to rhyme with which. If he can, then the chances are that the rhyme is too obtrusive, it has probably cost too much.

  We come here to the problem of the third constraint, that of fidelity to the meaning—that is, to what I have advisedly called the essential meaning. Arndt, in this connection, is surely right in suggesting that in the technical process of creating rhymed verse, many words or phrases are not so much primary ends in themselves as ‘acceptable fillers’, co-opted into the poet’s scheme for prosodic reasons. This seems to amount to a distinction between the primary semantic or expressive values in any given line or passage and its secondary or incidental details which have entered into combination with the main substance in one way or another. A translator’s decision as to which elements are primary and which are secondary in any particular case will be a matter for his spontaneous aesthetic judgement. So will his decision on how much he can afford to pay for rhyme (and that is now to say, for suitable rhyming and suitable diction) in the currency of judicious paraphrase. His piety will incline him to treat every word of the German text as sacred, but he will find it necessary in practice to treat some as more sacred than others. He will also be compelled, in English, to use some degree of periphrasis or expansion, if only by the fact that his equivalent words are often several syllables shorter than their German originals (though the contrary can also be the case). How much can acceptably be modified, added, left out? Is not literalness, like rhymelessness, incompatible with fidelity in any sophisticated sense? What is the acceptable price for what effects and what fidelities? Translation is the art of the least intolerable sacrifice, of the instinctive choice between competing imperfections; it constantly exercises a kind of informed judgement which it is almost impossible to rationalize or to discuss with anyone else.

  It follows, of course, that to compare other renderings with one’s own is tedious as well as odious, but concrete examples are nevertheless the best way of making these general points clearer. For the main illustration I revert again to Walter Arndt, whose version starts from a sophisticated critical position and is particularly instructive as the most recent (1976) of a mere handful which seriously and thoroughgoingly attempt to reproduce Goethe’s rhyming and metrical schemes in the unabridged whole of Parts One and Two. His translation of lines 315–35 is as follows: