Faust, Part I

A major new translation by award-winning poet and translator David Constantine that captures the lyrical liveliness of Goethe's original.

David Constantine is a poet, novelist, biographer, playwright and translator. He has taught German at the Universities of Durham, Oxford and Rutgers, New Jersey and is currently Visiting Professor in the School of English at the University of Liverpool. He lives in Oxford and (with his wife the translator Helen Constantine) is joint editor of Modern Poetry in Translation. His book of poetry Something for the Ghosts was short listed for the 2002 Whitbread Prize and his translation of Hans Magnus Enzensberger&rsquo;s Lighter than Air, won the Corneliu Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation in 2003. 
 
 
David Constantine is a poet, novelist, biographer, playwright and translator. He has taught German at the Universities of Durham, Oxford and Rutgers, New Jersey and is currently Visiting Professor in the School of English at the University of Liverpool. He lives in Oxford and (with his wife the translator Helen Constantine) is joint editor of Modern Poetry in Translation. His book of poetry Something for the Ghosts was short listed for the 2002 Whitbread Prize and his translation of Hans Magnus Enzensberger's Lighter than Air, won the Corneliu Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation in 2003. 
 
A S Byatt, novelist, short story writer, and critic, is the author of many books including Possession, winner of the 1990 Booker Prize; Babel Tower; The Biographer's Tale; and The Whistling Woman. She was appointed DBE in 1999.

Goethe's Faust reworks the late-medieval myth of Dr Faust, a brilliant scholar so disillusioned he resolves to make a contract or wager with the devil, Mephistopheles. The devil will do all he asks on Earth and seek to grant him a moment in life so glorious that he will wish it to last for ever. But if Faust does bid the moment stay, he falls to Mephisto and must serve him after death. In this first part of Goethe's great work the embittered thinker and Mephistopheles enter into their agreement, and soon Faust is living a life beyond his study and - in rejuvenated form - winning the love of the charming and beautiful Gretchen. But in this compelling tragedy of arrogance, unfulfilled desire and self-delusion, Faust, served by the devil, heads inexorably towards destruction.

Selected Poetry

This is to be the first verse translation of Goethe's poetry in Penguin Classics

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) German poet, novelist, playwright, courtier, and natural philosopher, one of the greatest figures in Western literature. He gained fame early with The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), but his most famous work was the poetic drama in two parts, Faust.

This is to be the first verse translation of Goethe's poetry in penguin classics and replaces Luke's own 1964 prose translation which has been in print continously since then (life sales 43,000).

Goethe

David Constantine

In this sequel to Faust, Mephistopheles takes Faust on a journey through ancient Greek mythology, conjuring for him the insurpassably beautiful Helen of Troy, as well as the classical gods. Faust falls in love with and marries Helen, embodying for Goethe his 'imaginative longing to join poetically the Romantic Medievalism of the germanic West to the classical genius of the Greeks'. Further to the themes of redemption and salvation in this great drama, are Goethe's eerie premonitions of modern phenomena such as inflation and the creation of life by scientific synthesis.

Goethe

Books by Goethe

Series by Goethe

Faust

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