Faust: A New Translation with Illustrations
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, TRANSLATED BY ZSUZSANNA OZSVÁTH & FREDRICK TURNER, ILLUSTRATED BY FOWZIA KARMINI
Reviewed by Dr. A. Louise Cole
Zsuzsanna Ozváth and Frederick Turner’s translation of Faust: A New Translation with Illustrations is a vibrant rendition of the Romantic classic. While Goethe wrote several influential poems during his lifetime, Faust was the magnum opus he spent sixty years composing and revising. Writing at the end of the eighteenth century and the dawn of the nineteenth century, Goethe situates his work within the evolving debate over the nature of humanity. The Enlightenment had emphasized the rationality of humans and highlighted their intellect, but Romanticists countered this trend by exploring the emotional and spiritual complexity of humanity. The first part of Goethe’s Faust confronts these paradoxes as Faust—through his dealings with the supernatural Mephistopheles (the Devil)—simultaneously reaches intellectual heights and sinks into moral depravity.
In his composition of Faust, Goethe resurrected the fifteenth-century stanzaic knittelvers verse form. By the nineteenth century, this verse form was considered somewhat archaic but also had a nostalgic quality. Ozváth and Turner’s translation masterfully mimics this verse form with four stressed syllables and couplets along with more varied rhyme schemes that add interest and emphasis to the dialogue.
The translators excel at tonal shifts among characters of differing social classes and shifts that capture the development of characters, such as Faust and his beloved, Margarete. Some characters, for example, have a contemporary, plebeian tone, like the Director in the prologue whose comments on how to successfully entertain an audience would sound at home in the Greatest Showman: “Let me tell you, just give them more and always more / That way you’ll never go astray and lose ‘em. / The trick with folk is to confuse ‘em; / To satisfy them, that’s a bore.” To highlight the complexity of humanity, these more conversational moments and the commonplace everyday concerns of characters, like those of the Director interested in making a profitable play, are contrasted with Faust’s lofty monologues, seeking to surpass the limits of human knowledge: “Was it a god who wrote these symbols there— / Stilling my inner rage so sweetly / My poor heart fill with joy completely? / And with a secret thrust lay bare / The powers of Nature to me intimately?” At his introduction, Faust is a scholar who desires nothing more than to pull back the layers of knowledge and understand the most profound mysteries of the universe, but throughout the play his desires draw him in different directions, leading him to become a seducer and murderer and ultimately a heart-broken man who laments ever having been born.
Ozváth and Turner’s translation gives modern readers a glimpse of what Goethe’s contemporary audience must have felt upon first reading the work. The verse form rhythmically draws us along, singing to us an ancient ballad, while the characters stir our hearts with full-fledged emotions we can recognize in our everyday lives. We as readers are confronted with the paradox confronting Faust and all humanity—the heights and limits of human reason and the depths and strength of human longing.