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STUARTATKINS Review Essay: Evaluating a Faust Translation. On the Occasion of Martin Greenberg's Version of Part One With few exceptions, reviews of new translations of Goethe's Faust are largely impressionistic and subjective.1 They may be fair or unfair, favorable or unfavorable, but they cannot offer carefully argued evaluations of them within the compass editors usually allow reviewers of translations who, moreover, in non-scholarly publications must devote most of their allotted space to informing readers about the original text and its author. In consequence, critics and scholars qualified to evaluate a translation will ordinarily limit their reading of it to a random sampling of "choice" passages; only if they notice in it elementary misreading of the source language or great unnaturalness of idiom in the target language will they feel constrained to comment on its quality and, if it is a frequently translated work like Faust, perhaps offer random comparisons of its merits and demerits with those of other translations. Even historical surveys of the translation of Faust into a given language seem, to judge from the several I have examined , methodologically flawed in the same way as such reviewing; if they are systematically comparative they evaluate only one or two short passages of great dramatic, lyrical, or thematic importance in a group of translations, with little concern for how any one translation, examined in its entirety, might be helpfully characterized2; and if they prefer rather to characterize generally each translation they treat, they do so—and theirs is perhaps the only way they can be fair, without becoming bogged down in minutiae, to the great variety of talents that any series of translators not mere botchers will display—by exhibiting passages not meant to be compared with other translations but to exemplify contrastively the results of its author's most and least successful efforts.3 Goethe Yearbook 211 To introduce some degree of objectivity into a survey I made of the some forty new Faust translations that appeared in the two decades beginning 1972, over twenty of which I was actually able to see and evaluate, I preselected twenty passages in Part One and thirty in Part Two the rendering of which into the target language would allow determination of the relative competence of translators as measured by how exact was their understanding of Goethe's German. The examination of these passages permitted not only evaluation of linguistic competence, but also—by looking at their larger immediate contexts—of such features of their translations as prosodie principles and their application, idiomaticality, tonal variations and contrastive levels of diction as more or less appropriately equivalent to those of the original German, and the degree to which translators allowed themselves textual expansion for the sake of meter, rhyme, or assonance or from failure to find expressions in the target language as terse or as concise as those of their German source. Superior skill in the target language takes many forms and, if a translation is reasonably faithful to an original text, will make one translation seem preferable to another; nevertheless, failure to convey more or less exactly the sense of the original—in our case Goethe 's Faust—must be considered a translational shortcoming when that sense has been definitively determined by previous grammatical and lexicographical scholarship and is, accordingly, a factor that must be taken into account when a translation is evaluated. Goethe's German lives, as all eager to translate it have felt, but the translator who does not recognize its archaisms and what has become lexically and punctuatively archaic since its writing will, however great his talents, inevitably at times—and some of these times will be unfortunate—give his readers not Goethe, but merely himself. Almost all recent Faust translations that I was able to evaluate seemed to me to have considerable or even great literary merit despite any misunderstanding of Goethe's German and despite a proclivity for discursive expansion avoided by only one or two translators. Now, with the publication of Martin Greenberg's felicitously idiomatic English version of Part One (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) a post-recent period of Faust translation opens most auspiciously. From his 1988 translations of...

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