David Constantine's major new translation includes a preface by A. S. Byatt on Goethe's Faust and other representations of the character throughout literature. This edition also includes an introduction by Constantine, chronology, notes, a synopsis of each scene and further reading.
Johann Wolfgang Goethe was born in 1749. He studied at Leipzig,
where he showed interest in the occult, and at Strassburg, where
Herder introduced him to Shakespeare's works and to folk poetry. He
produced some essays and lyrical verse, and at twenty-four came to
fame as part of the Sturm und Drang movement - a position
established on the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther.
Goethe worked on Faust throughout his life, while travelling
through Italy and returning to Weimar, where he directed the State
Theatre. He died in 1832.
David Constantine is a poet, novelist, biographer, playwright and
translator. He has taught German at the Universities of Durham,
Oxford 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. His
translation of Faust, Part One appeared from Penguin in 2005.
" One of those great works of literature into which a writer has
been able to combine his ranging preoccupations and understanding
as he worked."
-A. S. Byatt, from the Preface
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