Faust: Part One (Oxford World's Classics) - Softcover

Goethe, J. W. Von

Softcover

ISBN 10: 019953621X ISBN 13: 9780199536214

Publisher: OUP Oxford, 2008

Synopsis

Faust

About this title

Review

`Luke has done us all - including, if one may say so, Goethe - a potently good turn. We should take advantage of it.' D.J. Enright, Observer

`a translation "for our time" without signs of strain.' D. J. Enright, The Observer

`At last! A translation of Goethe's masterpiece which reads like a masterpiece in English. David Luke conveys the meaning, intellectual passion and Byronic raciness of the original. This is a poet's as well as a scholar's version, for David Luke has written original poems of great distinction.' Stephen Spender, Spectator

'scrupulous and well-informed, backed up by scholarly clarification of the text's difficult history ... one of the most spirited efforts to capture the great poetic drama' Independent

'a translation of really poetic quality, preceded by an informative introduction and a most useful synopsis of the various stages of composition of the drama ... This reissue is most welcome: for over and above having available for the non-Germanist an English version of this novel.'The Classical Era

'signs of struggle are remarkably few ... The price he pays for rhyming is never too high, and the profits are immense. Michael Hamburger once noted that while Faust had been translated again and again, no single version had established itself as a standard text for the English-speaking world. With his Parts One and Two, both in Oxford University Press World's Classics, Luke has provided us with exactly that.'Times Literary Supplement

About the Author

Before he was thirty, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had proven himself a master of the novel, drama, and lyric poetry. But even more impressive than his versatility was his unwillingness ever to settle into a single style or approach; whenever he used a literary form, he made it something new.Born in 1749 to a well-to-do family in Frankfurt, he was sent to Strasbourg to earn a law degree. There, he met the poet-philosopher Herder, discovered Shakespeare, and began to write poetry. His play Gotz von Berlichingen (1773) made him famous throughout Germany. He was invited to the court of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, where he quickly became a cabinet minister. In 1774 his novel of Romantic melancholy, The Sorrows of a Young Werther, electrified all of Europe. Soon he was at work on the first version of his Faust, which would finally appear as a fragment in 1790.In the 1780s, Goethe visited England and immersed himself in classical poetry. The next decade saw the appearance of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, his novel of a young artist's education, and a wealth of poetry and criticism. He returned to the Faust material around the turn of the century and completed Part 1 in 1808.The later years of his life were devoted to a bewildering array of pursuits: research in botany and a theory of colors, a novel (Elective Affinities), the evocative poems of the West-Eastern Divan, and his great autobiography, Poetry and Truth. In his eighties he prepared a forty-volume edition of his works; the forty-first volume, published after his death in 1832, was the second part of Faust.Goethe's wide-ranging mind could never be confined to one form or one philosophy. When asked for the theme of his masterwork, Faust, he could only say, "From heaven through all the world to hell"; his subject was nothing smaller.

Walter Kaufmann was a philosopher and poet, as well as a renowned translator of Friedrich Nietzsche. His books include Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, From Shakespeare to Existentialism, and Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre. He was a Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, where he taught after receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1947 until his death in 1980. He held visiting appointments at many American and foreign universities, including Columbia, Cornell, Heidelberg, Jerusalem, and the Australian National University, and his books have been translated into Dutch, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish.

Edition details

• Publisher: OUP Oxford
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 019953621X
• ISBN 13: 9780199536214
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 240