DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Faustus: From the German of Goethe

Translated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Frederick Burwick editor James C McKusick editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:4th Oct '07

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Faustus: From the German of Goethe cover

The major work of German literature, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust (1808), was translated into English by one of Britain's most capable mediators of German literature and philosophy, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Goethe himself twice referred to Coleridge's translation of his Faust. Goethe's character wrestles with the very metaphysical and theological problems that preoccupied Coleridge: the meaning of the Logos, the apparent opposition of theism and pantheism. Coleridge, the poet of tormented guilt, of the demonic and the supernatural, found himself on familiar ground in translating Faust. Because his translation reveals revisions and reworkings of Coleridge's earlier works, his Faust contributes significantly to the understanding of Coleridge's entire oeuvre. Coleridge began, but soon abandoned, the translation in 1814, returning to the task in 1820. At Coleridge's own insistence, it was published anonymously in 1821, illustrated with 27 line engravings copied by Henry Moses after the original plates by Moritz Retzsch. His publisher, Thomas Boosey, brought out another edition in 1824. Although several critics recognized that it was Coleridge's work, his role as translator was obscured because of its anonymous publication. Coleridge himself declared that he 'never put pen to paper as translator of Faust', and subsequent generations mistakenly attributed the translation to George Soane, a minor playwright, who had actually commenced translating for a rival press. This edition of Coleridge's translation provides the textual and documentary evidence of his authorship, and presents his work in the context of other contemporary efforts at translating Goethe's Faust.

...anyone interested in Anglo-German relations in the Romantic age will have to read this book and the critical heritage it is rapidly generating. s
a work of great scholarship which promises to reconfigure our understanding not only of the life and works of a major English writer, but of that writer's complex role in European cultural commerce... the recovery of Coleridge's time-concealed masterpiece promises to trigger a ripple of realignments right across both English and European Romanticism. * Kelly Grovier, Times Literary Supplement *

ISBN: 9780199229680

Dimensions: 241mm x 163mm x 37mm

Weight: 832g

360 pages