Goethe's Faust, the Coleridge Translation

Goethe s poetic drama Faustus has long been recognized as one of the great masterpieces of world literature, and it has been seen on stage by more people than any other German play in history. It tells the story of an ambitious scholar who makes a pact with the devil to give him everything he desires. This astonishing English translation was published anonymously in 1821 and largely forgotten for over a century. However, two eminent literary scholars (Frederick Burwick and James C. McKusick) recently identified it as the work of the great English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Examining the work, reviewers have agreed that its elegant and fluid verse not only reflects Coleridge s inimitable style but indeed shows the poet working at the height of his powers. Coleridge s Faust is both an unparalleled rendition of Goethe s original and a stunning achievement in its own right.

This edition has been professionally edited by Neil McArthur (University of Manitoba) from the original 1821 text and formatted for the Kindle. It includes the complete text as well as twenty-six engravings by Moritz Retzsch published with the original 1821 edition. This is the only ebook edition of the play, which is not included in any of the collected works.

There is an agility to the translation which reminds one of . . . the organic intensity of George Chapman s [Homer] . . . . If T. S. Eliot was right, that every time a new work of literature is introduced into the canon, all previous works must adjust themselves to accommodate the new arrival, 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