Reviews

period which is not necessarily a bad thing. But it is clear enough from the shared concerns of the acts of reception discussed in this book that Petrarchs importance in Romantic England lay in his softly spoken claim to ll the void left by the great Romantic totem whose absence Wordsworth had lamented in the famous opening lines of London, 1802: MILTON, thou shouldst be living at this hour: | England hath need of thee: she is a fen | Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen. The consensus among canonical male poets that Petrarchs voice did not possess the public and declamatory quality that England needed did not eclipse Petrarchism, but consigned his poetic language to feminine and domestic poetic situations in which, as Zuccato convincingly demonstrates, Petrarchs inuence on the literary output of Romantic England is too important to be ignored. Alex MacMillan Clare Hall, Cambridge
DOI: 10.3366/tal.2011.0009

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust, Part I. Translated by David Constantine. Pp. lviii+182. London: Penguin Classics, 2005. Pb. 8.99. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust, Part II. Translated by David Constantine. Pp. xcvi+285. London: Penguin Classics, 2009. Pb. 10.99. I must declare an interest at once: my own translation of Goethes Faust appeared in 1999 (Part One and the Urfaust) and 2007 (Part Two). David Constantines new translation for Penguin Classics is to be welcomed; a successor to Philip Waynes version, which was prosodically more or less accurate, but awkward and archaic in style and diction, was long overdue. In his introductory material, Constantine puts the case for translating Faust into verse eloquently and utterly convincingly. Prose versions of this intensely lyrical work, such as Abraham Haywards of 1835 and Barker Fairleys of 1970 are, he argues, quite wrong in [their] premise. Nothing in Faust works independently of metre and rhyme . . . The liveliness of the text, its peculiar vitality and why it is vital to us is a product of its poetry. A prose version may do some service, help us understand the lexical sense; but in the chief endeavour, the conveying of the peculiar liveliness of the original, it fails automatically by being prose. But how far to go in reproducing Goethes verse forms theres the rub. The English translator, almost uniquely, has the opportunity to mimic Goethes German verse with great delity; the

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stress patterns of English and German are so close that the huge variety of metrical and verse forms Goethe uses in Faust can be, and have been, rendered successfully into English. The same principle applies to rhyme though here, self-evidently, more labour is required; it may be more strenuous to rhyme, for example, the feminine endings of hendecasyllabics in English than, say, in German or Italian, but it can be done, as John Whaley and David Luke have demonstrated. Does this mean that the English translator of Faust is therefore obliged to reproduce Goethes verse with the maximum possible prosodic accuracy? Constantine declares from the start that he is not a mimetic translator (at least not in prosodic terms). He does not always seek to reproduce the means by which in German Goethe achieves his effects, aiming instead for equivalence of effect by whatever means he has at his disposal in English. In practice, the outcome is that he does not seek to place his rhymes exactly where Goethe does (as Walter Arndt, for example, strives ofciously to do, but at the price of bizarre lexical contortions). This is a perfectly reasonable licence indeed, in his more informal Madrigalvers Goethe himself varies his rhyming patterns wildly, so even the English translator who uses strict rhyme has a welcome degree of wriggle-room, in this verse form at least; it is a different matter in more formal passages, especially in forms like ottava rima, terza rima, or alexandrines. Constantines second freedom in the use of rhyme is more contentious: he uses mostly halfrhyme and compensatory assonance (and occasionally, it seems to me, also eye rhyme) while assuring the reader that if he judges the placing of Goethes rhymes to be particularly important, that is, actually engendering vital effects, then he (Constantine) is careful to follow him (Goethe) closely. This is a problematic issue. It is difcult to cavil at a translators chosen strategy, especially if it is as carefully and eloquently expressed as Constantines; but I am often made uneasy by this method. Goethes verse is frequently very strongly proled by rhyme, especially in Faust, even in his less formal verse. To cite two examples: Mephistos sarcasm in lines 32767 is forcefully underscored by rhyme (Ein schner, ser Zeitvertreib! | Dir steckt der Doktor noch im Leib); Constantines version lacks punch here (A ne pastime! It seems were not | Entirely shot of the doctor yet). And Gretchens concluding lines (35856) in the scene at the well (Doch alles was dazu mich trieb | Gott! war so gut! ach war so lieb!), which cry out for a strong rhyme, are rendered: But everything that drove me to it, | Heavens, it was good, oh it was sweet. Are we really being asked to accept to it and was sweet even as half-rhyme? Having said this, Constantine is as good as his word when

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he renders a Mephistophelian couplet very neatly when the Devil rst sets eyes on Helen of Troy (lines 647980): So there she is. She would not trouble me. | Pretty enough, but not my cup of tea. (Das wr sie denn! Vor dieser htt ich Ruh; | Hbsch ist sie wohl, doch sagt sie mir nicht zu.) Altogether, Constantine frequently tends to rhyme (or half-rhyme) against the grain of the metrical stress, which produces a dissonant effect: Set limits on its [viz. the seas] stretch of wet | And cram it deep back down its own gullet (lines 102301); Come, spirit, into the roomy wet | And live at once without limit (lines 83278); Admit it now: from this palace | You take the world in your embrace (lines 112256). And many more. What a relief it is to the ear when Constantine (mostly in passages of Knittelvers) rhymes more fully and (lines 281124, 354861) with the stress! Nor does Constantine aim at mimetic exactitude in metre, even in Goethes passages of regular (rhymed or unrhymed) iambic pentameter in the Wald und Hhle scene of Part One (lines 3217ff.) or Ariels instructions to the elves in Part Two (lines 4621ff.); and he makes no attempt to reproduce Goethes vividly expressive dactyls in the image of the loom of time (lines 5089: I work at the hurtling loom, I make | Of time Gods living cloak). In the ottava rima of Dedication (lines 132) there are lines of four or six stresses that interrupt the ow of the rhythm, and Fausts grandiose terza rima speech in the opening scene of Part Two (lines 4679727) has little of the relentless drive of Goethes (or indeed Dantes) verse partly because Constantines half-rhymes do not vividly enough emphasize the triadic rhyming structure, and partly because the metre is less than regular and, with few exceptions, his lines are not hendecasyllabics. Similarly, in Act III I miss the stately tripartite rhythms of Goethes iambic trimeter in lines such as I was turning away in anger and hurrying at once (8684), For I see the mark of revulsion on your brows (8645), or Forbidding the quarrels turbulent to and fro (8827). In the passages of trochaic tetrameter, it seems to me, Constantine is more successful in conveying the agitation and urgency expressed in these lines because he reproduces the metre more exactly, more mimetically. He also respects, by and large, the metrical pattern of responsions in the odes of the chorus in Act III, though this subtlety will be lost on the majority of his readers because he does not explain in any detail the complexities of choral strophe, antistrophe, and epode regrettably, because he is very knowledgeable in Greek verse. The parodic alexandrines of Act IV are more faithfully reproduced, in terms

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of metre and rhyme; all the more reason then to regret the inadequacy of the terza rima passage. For all my reservations about the prosodic dimensions of Constantines translation, it must be acknowledged that no doubt because he is less constrained by strictures of rhyme and metre in lexical terms he is close to the sense of Goethes original; indeed on many occasions he makes me aware of the freedom I exercised in my own version in departing from the letter (though not, I hope, from the spirit) of the text in my pursuit of prosodic mimesis. Constantines style and diction are generally well suited to the myriad registers of Goethes text. Occasionally there are quaint, even rather archaic expressions: Comes bloated from excess of tablefare (line 114); Somewhat his life would be in better plight (283); Sir, be advised betimes therefore (3095); Get thee hence, foul thing! (3326); Scatter the seed, comes foison in due season (6605). At other times the language comes close to the trendiness that Constantine warns against in his own introduction though this is often justied by the context: bad karma (Unseliges, line 5379); toe-rag (du Lumpenhund, line 5472); When I [Seismos] came on big (Als . . . ich mich stark betrug, lines 755960). As one would expect from a distinguished German scholar, the translation is lexically accurate. Nevertheless, I was made uneasy on certain occasions. In lines 52514 (Gb es nicht Scheite | Und Kohlentrachten | Die Herdesbreite | Zur Glut entfachten), it seems to me that Constantine has confused Herd (hearth) with Herde (herd or ock): To grill by the eldful | The herds and the ocks. He tells us in his translators note that he has checked his version against those of several predecessors; all those he mentions (and indeed others) understand this, I think correctly, as hearth. In line 5767 he renders wenn es beliebt as With your permission, Sir; surely the sense here is wenn es [einem] beliebt, that is, if one so wishes, if we please as previous translators have also understood it. I cannot see how he understands that Helen Never speaks for herself (Nie wird sie mndig, line 7430); again, previous translators are surely correct in rendering this as She never comes of age (Atkins) or She never need grow up (Luke). In lines 77489 (Ich merk es hat bei diesen Leuten | Verwandtschaft Groes zu bedeuten) Constantine somehow arrives at I see these people like to demonstrate | Afnity with what is great surely it means something like I see that kinship means a great deal to these people (or, as Wayne has it rather comically, I see that kinship in this crowd | With pregnant meaning is endowed). I cannot work out how in lines 117656 he arrives at If they bend me, henceforth all

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bent and straight | Sheep and goats may copulate from Und wenn ich mich betren lasse | Wer heit denn knftighin der Tor? but perhaps there is a coded allusion here that I have missed. In the nal scene of Part Two, I do not understand why he renders Jungfrau as girl rather than Virgin (line 12009) it is after all the Virgin Mary in her glory who is being addressed; and in the supplication of the Magna Peccatrix (lines 120412) why he alludes to [Christs] white feet of which there is no hint in the text, which refers to the holy feet. In Constantines full and informative notes to the text there is a striking slip of the pen when in the note to line 10039 Fausts opening soliloquy in Act IV is said to be in iambic tetrameters; it is in fact in iambic trimeters. If I have certain reservations about Constantines translation, I have none about his introductions, especially that to Part Two, in which he provides an enthusiastic appreciation of Goethes vast and panoramic Gesamtkunstwerk. He relates it to Brechts notion of non-Aristotelian epic theatre and to the theatrical expectations of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. He correctly and perceptively points out the frequent and extended instances of epic narrative and commentary in the second part, while emphasizing the complex interplay of lyrical, dramatic, and epic elements, which coexist as restlessly as wind, currents and tide in a rocky sea. He explains Goethes dazzling kaleidoscope of genres: Part II in its totality is [Friedrich] Schlegels progressive universal poetry, musically and ironically realized in a mixing of the genres: a panopticon of masque, operetta, cantata, oratorio, dance, allegory, song and spectacle, tragic pathos and hilarious comedy. Constantine also draws attention to the often obliquely expressed but essential contemporary political and historical dimensions of Part Two. Set ostensibly in the sixteenth century, the drama nonetheless reects and comments on the great events of Goethes lifetime: the corruption of the ancien rgime in eighteenth-century Europe, French Revolution, Napoleonic conquest, Restoration, and even the July Revolution of 1830 at the time Goethe was nishing Faust which, as Constantine correctly has it, is concerned with a particular and very important period of European history and with the dispiritingly perennial workings of power. He also provides a wonderfully sympathetic (and indeed empathetic) judgement of Goethes ironic and poetic ambivalence; Goethe is a writer who takes up subjects in which he makes himself complicit but against which he must revolt . . . In epic and dramatic forms his deepest loyalty is to the lyric, whose very nature is to go out into other identities, to entertain them as

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possibilities, never to foreclose. The whole play is unstable, expands into boundlessness, but is held in place strictly, on the boards of a stage in verse, by rhyme and by metre, by one man dreaming and writing it, over sixty years. I couldnt agree more. John R. Williams St Andrews
DOI: 10.3366/tal.2011.0010

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust. A Tragedy in Two Parts, with the unpublished scenarios for the Walpurgisnacht and the Urfaust. Translated with an introduction and notes by John R. Williams. Pp. 496. Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2007. Pb. 3.99. English Faust translation has become a congested eld, with versions of Faust I and Faust II by John Williams (1999 and now completed in this expanded volume of 2007) and David Constantine (2005 and 2009) joining David Lukes of 1987 and 1994. Such is the quality of all three that there has never been a better time to be an anglophone reader of the work. Each translator brings something different to Goethes epic verse drama. Luke writes in a modernized Shakespearean idiom that is elegant and rich in irony. Constantine writes as a contemporary poet, with concision and a rugged, inty strangeness that comes of taking Goethes metaphors literally and often has a nicely foreignizing effect. Without resorting to poeticisms, he manages to make his Faust sound like real poetry from another time and place. Williams translation is the most lucid of the three, and in this respect he reproduces most accurately one of the chief modes of Goethes poem. At the same time he manages triumphantly to replicate the bizarre Gothic architecture of Goethes prosodic schemes, with their predilection for feminine rhymes easily achieved in highly inected German, less so in English. To the general reader all three translations can and should be recommended without hesitation. For those teaching Faust as part of course on European Romanticism, say, a difcult choice awaits. It seems to this reviewer that Williams is the clearest guide to Goethes often cryptic sense. For the anglophone student of German who needs help in deciphering Goethes text, Williams offers the most reliable guidance though he also offers much more than that. In particular, he provides material that Luke and Constantine do not: the unpublished (self-censored?) material from the Walpurgisnacht in which Satan conducts a black mass on the Blocksberg, with appropriate blasphemies and obscenities, and the incomplete so-called Urfaust text

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