A Translator’s Note

I recently completed the revision of my translation of Goethe’s Faust, the publication of whose two parts in a single volume is now being prepared by the Yale University Press. This revision is something I have ardently desired for some time: few translators are finally satisfied, and many would (it seems) go on revising and revising. But of course one must call a halt.

I have kept to the purpose of my original translation, though perhaps with more flexibility, to provide an English Faust “in a language really used by men.” Those are Wordsworth’s words in which he laid down early in the nineteenth century the standard for his poetry that by the beginning of the twentieth had become the standard of modern poetry. Goethe anticipated Wordsworth in linguistic realism. “No other poem in modern literature of comparable length and complexity [to Faust] stays so close to the vernacular,” wrote Barker Fairley, a superior Goethe scholar of a past generation, notable especially among scholars for the excellence of his English. I have profited from the criticism of relatives, friends, reviewers, and time—especially from time, the most just critic. She got to work early with her criticism. When I received the author’s copy of my translation of Faust: Part One (1992), I sat down at once, as writers do with the arrival of a first copy from the publisher, and began to read, to read words that were only too familiar. Yet soon I found myself reaching for a pencil to correct this and amend that. And so it went, off and on, these twenty years. A word here, a phrase there, and often enough whole passages. Sometimes, exasperatingly, a single sentence proved impossible, utterly intractable. How many times did I rewrite it! And did I get it right after all?

Does translating Goethe sound like hard work? It is, and it is also a great pleasure. One is working with great poetry, with greatness. That is surely what you would call a good job, under a superior employer. Unlike an employee, however, you enjoy complete independence. The goal is fixed, but the German matter to be Englished is completely in your hands, to do with as you think best. What is the goal? To make something in English that is a match for the German. Match is David Belos’s term (in Is that a Fish in Your Ear?) for what has always been a difficult thing to name satisfactorily— a translation’s relation to its foreign-language original. Match tells you that the translation is not the original magically metamorphosed into an English replica; translating Faust is not a matter of finding an English that is somehow Goethe still uttering his own words. I have known the most sophisticated people to wish that a translation were just as good as—meaning, exactly like—the work it translates but complain that it isn’t. I can’t forbear quoting at this point a piece of wit of G. K. Chesterton’s quoted by Jorge Luis Borges. He, Chesterton, “said that he did not know Persian but that Fitzgerald’s translation [of the Rubáiyát] was too good a poem to be faithful to the original.”

A match is a likeness, not a copy. It can’t be a copy because of the differences between languages—between German and English, profound differences in the way the two languages think and work—and other differences. Maybe in prose, translation copies are sometimes possible. Not in verse. In translating poetry you are thrown very much upon your own resources. In prose you have the foreign sentence before you to follow, more or less closely, in the way it builds its structure of meaning. (Not that that is easily done!) But in poetry so much more goes into the construction: meter or the musical movement of the language; a diction that is more than suitable, that is right, in which you must continually invent to be true; if rhymed verse, a felicity you sometimes hit right off but usually must try for again and again—a general harmony of...