The Project Gutenberg EBook of Faust, by Goethe

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Title: Faust

Author: Goethe

Release Date: December 25, 2004 [EBook #14460]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FAUST ***

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FAUST

A TRAGEDY

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN

OF

GOETHE

WITH NOTES

BY

CHARLES T BROOKS

SEVENTH EDITION.

BOSTON
TICKNOR AND FIELDS

MDCCCLXVIII.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1856,
by CHARLES T. BROOKS,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court
of the District of Rhode Island.

UNIVERSITY PRESS:
WELCH, BIGELOW, AND COMPANY,
CAMBRIDGE.

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.

Perhaps some apology ought to be given to English scholars, that is, those
who do not know German, (to those, at least, who do not know what sort of
a thing Faust is in the original,) for offering another translation to the
public, of a poem which has been already translated, not only in a literal
prose form, but also, twenty or thirty times, in metre, and sometimes with
great spirit, beauty, and power.

The author of the present version, then, has no knowledge that a rendering
of this wonderful poem into the exact and ever-changing metre of the
original has, until now, been so much as attempted. To name only one
defect, the very best versions which he has seen neglect to follow the
exquisite artist in the evidently planned and orderly intermixing of
_male_ and _female_ rhymes, _i.e._ rhymes which fall on the last syllable
and those which fall on the last but one. Now, every careful student of
the versification of Faust must feel and see that Goethe did not
intersperse the one kind of rhyme with the other, at random, as those
translators do; who, also, give the female rhyme (on which the vivacity of
dialogue and description often so much depends,) in so small a proportion.

A similar criticism might be made of their liberty in neglecting Goethe's
method of alternating different measures with each other.

It seems as if, in respect to metre, at least, they had asked themselves,
how would Goethe hav