Faust (2 page)

Faust’s prospects are grim. Despair and the idea of suicide are ever his close companions.

But suppose that Faust were to lose the wager and that through Mephisto’s machinations he indeed were to experience the supreme Moment, the incomparable, all-encompassing pinprick of time. In that case, for a single instant of usurped divinity, Faust would look upon even hellfire as trivial punishment. The stakes of the wager—no doubt by design—are not what they seem to be at first sight. They require “speculation” in the alchemical sense, meaning intellectual probing and testing. As it turns out, an accounting of who won or who lost is not finally at issue in
Faust
. All is secondary to the quest for the transcendent Moment. It is Faust’s irrepressible striving to extend the human potential and to break through the restrictions inherent in human nature that finally tips the balance in favor of Faust’s salvation, even though, in legalistic terms, he may have lost his bet with Mephisto.

The first part of the drama,
Faust I
—offered in this volume in an English translation as well as in the original German—sparkles in its manifold poetic modes and impresses us with a substantial integrity. It stands on its own
dramatic feet without
Faust II
and is frequently performed, even though it leaves the hero’s destiny and the outcome of the wager in abeyance. At the end of our play, one sees Gretchen lying on her prison pallet uttering, Ophelia-like, deranged shreds of truth that pierce Faust’s inmost being. She is guilty of murdering her illegitimate baby, whose father is her seducer-lover, Faust. We, as readers of the play, know that Gretchen was moved by love alone and was driven to despair by love. Having seen her despised and humiliated by her own people, we are relieved to see her find mercy in God’s eyes and grateful for a hint that she will be given a luminous place in Heaven. Faust, on the other hand, must continue to live, bound to a minion of Hell and inextricably enmeshed in Evil.

The modes and moods of Goethe’s dramatic discourse are never for long the same or reliably predictable. There is the solemn and metrically uniform celebration of divine majesty manifested in the rolling planetary spheres of the “Prologue in Heaven,” immediately followed by the irregular, doggerel-like verses of the opening monologue. Shakespearean blank verse is never far removed from medieval hymnic chants. Strictly composed four-foot stanzaic lines may still echo in our minds when, near the drama’s end, we reach the ragged and harsh shreds of prose in “Gloomy Day—Field.” It is apparent that we must not look to verse forms as such to provide us with any unifying principle in
Faust
. The mood may shift from high seriousness to levity, from profound sentiment to callousness, from optimism to despair, oscillations that seem almost instantaneous, like an alternating current. They soon reveal themselves as important reflections of the theme or content of the drama; for are not the ambivalences and paradoxes inherent in human existence—and the absence of absolutes—important aspects of Faust’s frustration, and are they not near the source of what Goethe explicitly named a “tragedy”?

Even before the “Prologue in Heaven” ends, the vision of celestial magnificence is suddenly cut short by the ironic colloquialisms of Lucifer-Mephisto:

And a bit later, when we witness Faust bemoaning his painfully futile encounter with the Earth Spirit, there is a knock on the door. It is Wagner, his disciple and assistant, who had listened to his master’s outcries as they echoed through the corridors. As a devotee of traditional scholarship and loyal defender of the sanctity of venerable texts, he says upon entering the study:

Wagner radically misjudges his master. By his ludicrously inappropriate reference to the travails of Faust’s soul, he reveals himself—through an ironic shaft directed at the audience—as a prototypal philistine.

Often there is no temporal sequence of contrary positions, but a simultaneous presence of mutually exclusive polarities. Consider the following: when Faust tells Mephisto that he is bent on a life of all-encompassing experience beyond the reach of ordinary men, Mephisto answers mockingly:

The lines are deceptively simple. Actually they contain multi-leveled ironies. The poet with whom Faust is to ally himself here stands for a person who conjures up empty illusions of the kind Faust continuously creates for himself. The reader realizes—perhaps in a double-take response—that the images of Faust’s fantasy are indeed the stuff of poetry and are constitutive elements of the
Faust
poem itself. It is a case of involuted paradoxes: Mephisto, the no-nonsense materialist contemptuous of poetic imagination, scoffs at Faust and recommends that he make himself over into a dramatic character—only in this manner could he hope to find fulfillment. It is a provocation directed not only at Faust but at the reader-spectator as well. And it is the
Faust
drama—itself a poetic battleground between poetry and anti-poetry—that continuously generates provisional answers to Mephisto’s challenge. After all, acting counter to Mephisto’s corrosive stance is our realization that Faust need not bother himself to make an “alliance with a poet.” Surely, in his case such a step would be redundant. For the public, on the other hand, Mephisto’s suggestion may be only partially ironic, because it is aware of the “as if” condition of the stage. Mephisto’s radical critique opens unsuspected avenues into our minds and nerve centers. We are compelled to measure the distance between fantasy and quotidian reality and “get inside” the process of poetic transformation. We might indeed take upon ourselves a share of Faust’s own frustration:

as we come upon the one explicit and unironic expression of Faustian ambivalence.

While a diversity of approaches to the
Faust
poem have, over the approximately century and a half of its existence, produced indispensable insights, critics with an all too single-minded perspective tended to obscure values that are accessible only to a different optic. The poem’s philosophical problems—for example, those having to do with the nature of truth and of cosmic governance—have been explored perhaps more intensively than any other aspect. Psychological analyses of the characters have been carried out, as well as researches dealing exclusively with the rich field of Faustian imagery. We are fortunate in having comparative studies dealing with the literary and spiritual influences that went into the composition of both parts of the poem. A considerable body of evidence also has been marshaled in support of the proposition that a far-reaching analogy exists between Goethe’s vision of life-forms in the earth’s flora—such as dicotyledonous plants—and the principles governing the structure
of Faust
.

When all is said and done, however, the simple question, What is
Faust
about? is still capable of eliciting fresh responses, if only for the reason that by looking for meaning we are implicitly searching for some underlying coherence or for a metaphor that might convincingly convey a sense of structure. To find textual confirmation for one’s own intuited image of unity in
Faust
is the exhilarating reward of devoted study. Certainly, even after only a fleeting acquaintance, one must ask the question: What is it that keeps Faust dissatisfied, even though he has mastered all
the academic disciplines of his day? Why could he not be proud of his accomplishments and have faith in human progress like his redoubtable assistant Wagner? At least part of the answer may be found in the most concentrated symbol of Faust’s imperious need: the all-encompassing Moment, the
Augenblick
, that is the subject of the wager with Mephisto and the thematic undercurrent of the entire drama. To experience, in a single instant, the succession of events that mark our existence in time is equivalent to eliminating time altogether; it means an existence in a continuous present tense. As temporal creatures, nervously feeding a shortening future into a lengthening past, we attribute to the gods a timeless mode of being and an existence in total simultaneity. Therefore Faust’s craving for the “highest moment” really amounts to the ultimate
hubris;
he is reaching for more than mere superiority among men—more than Macbeth, who would be king, and more than Oedipus, the incomparable solver of riddles who
was
the king and came to know it too late. Faust reaches for divinity and is “hell-bent” to burst out of his imprisonment in temporality.

Since Goethe’s death, in 1832, the Faust story, through its various transmutations, has become one of the central myths of the Western world. The theme fascinated composers like Wagner, Schumann, Berlioz, Gounod, Boito, and Mahler, all of whom created important operatic or orchestral scores inspired by Goethe’s drama. American writers have recently paid renewed attention to the earlier chapbook accounts. Stephen Vincent Benét’s play
The Devil and Daniel Webster
and the musical comedy
Damn Yankees
, transposed from a novel by Douglass Wallop, were successful Broadway productions and continue to be popular onstage and on television. Intellectually more demanding and ambitious are Thomas Mann’s last big novel,
Doctor Faustus
(1947), whose plot parallels the pre-Goethean story, but which also contains unmistakable imprints of Goethe’s
Faust
, and the 1981 motion picture
Mephisto
, loosely based on a novel concerned with the career and questionable morality of a German actor-director who achieved fame in his role of Mephisto. The film is a remarkable directorial accomplishment by Istvan Szabo.

The headlong strides in the natural sciences and in technology, the imperious reach for nature’s inmost secrets by twentieth-century “speculators of the elements” operating in computerized laboratories, the thrust toward man-made velocities that seemingly approach the impassable limits this side of omnipresence—can these not be seen as assaults on hitherto forbidden realms? In our day the search for the
Augenblick
is proceeding with increasing intensity. According to the Gospel of Luke, Satan showed to Jesus “all the kingdoms of the world in an instant of time” and then offered them to him; and it is not difficult to see in this second temptation a prefiguration of the Faustian wager, a “harking forward” to late-twentieth-century technological wizardry.

T
O MAKE great poetry accessible by translation is a joy as well as a harsh discipline. The joy is of the kind that follows the completion of any difficult piece of work. The discipline and harsh constraints flow from the peculiar forces at play. On the one hand, there is the obligation to remain as close as possible to the original text and to avoid “irresponsible” departures from it. From that point of view, each recasting or remolding of the poet’s carefully chosen phrases can be judged to be a little betrayal.

The position at the other extreme has its source in the conviction that a good or faithful translation is only very rarely a literal transfer, that it is rather the transmigration of feeling, form, and thought from the imprecisions of one language to the quirks and coincidences of another.

It is important to give heed to both contrary impulses without entirely submitting to either, maintaining, wherever possible, a delicate balance between them. I have striven toward an ideal of a vital, rhythmic, American idiom so that the general impression might be similar to what a German reader might receive from the original. By relinquishing rhyme and strict meter, except in the interspersed songs and ballads, I gained the freedom to be more faithful to sense and spirit than I could otherwise have been. I believe that a consistent adherence to all the details of prosody cannot be sustained in a work of the scope of
Faust
without doing violence to natural diction. Moreover,
it has for some time been clear to me that a German rhymed line is not necessarily rendered most felicitously—or most faithfully—by an equivalent English rhyme. Such a translation easily suffers from a jingling quality that may vitiate or even falsify the mood of the original.

The language of this translation is meant to be neither archaic nor wholly colloquial. Instead I tried to steer an intermediate course, in the hope of conveying a sense of the poetic immediacy and continual urgency of the German text.

This Bantam
Faust
was first published in 1962, was reissued in 1967, and now—more than twenty years after its first appearance—is being granted a new life. It is not very often that translators are given a second chance, and it is strangely illuminating—when reviewing the earlier version—to be conveyed into one’s own past and, as it were, to come face-to-face with one’s translating persona of an earlier day. There is a nervous “hello” and also a firm “good-bye.”