Faust Part One and Part Two

by Carl R. Mueller

As much poem as it is play, Faust is the spiritual quest of a soul determined to explore the very nature of Reality, a revolutionary work that refuses to accept limitations, but, like Romanticism itself, embraces all, the natural world of everyday life, as well as the Great World of universal experience, the macrocosm as well as the microcosm. It records the journey of the feminine from its roots in the physical to the realm of Pure Idea, from animal to Eternal Feminine. Formation/Transformation is the road the play travels in its alchemical advance from base to exalted, from the unformed state to total individuation.


This major new translation is by Carl R. Mueller of the School of Theater, Film and Television, UCLA. Like his translations for Smith and Kraus of the complete Greek tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophokles and Euripides, his Faust seeks to create a text in English that renders this masterpiece of poetic world theater in a fresh, lively and contemporary guise both for the modern reader and the stage.


Author MUELLER, a professor of theater at UCLA, is currently at work with Hugh Denard of the University of Warwick (UK) on a complete translation of the nineteen plays of Euripides. Mueller has also translated volujmes of Schnitzler, Wedekind, Strindberg, von Kleist, Pirandello, Sophokles and Aeschylus for Smith and Kraus.

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First published January 17, 2014

About the author

Carl R. Mueller has since 1967 been professor in the Department of Theater at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he has taught theater history, criticism, dramatic literature, and playwriting, as well as having directed. He was educated at Northwestern University, where he received a B.S. in English. After work in graduate English at the University of California, Berkeley, he received his M.A. in playwriting at UCLA, where he also completed his Ph.D. in theater history and criticism. In addition, he was a Fulbright Scholar in Berlin in 1960-1961. A translator for more than forty years, he has translated and published works by Georg Büchner, Bertolt Brecht, Frank Wedekind, Gerhart Hauptmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Friedrich Hebbel, to name a few. His published translation of Ödön von Horváth's Tales from the Vienna Woods was given its London West End premiere in July 1999. For Smith and Kraus, he has translated volumes of plays by Arthur Schnitzler, August Strindberg, Luigi Pirandello, Heinrich von Kleist, and Frank Wedekind, as well as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust, Parts I and II. In addition to translating the complete plays of Euripides and Aeschylus for Smith and Kraus, he has also co-translated the plays of Sophocles. His translations have been performed in every English-speaking country and have appeared on BBC-TV.

Reviews

[Lars Winky · Rating 5 out of 5]

LOVED the prose, the rhytm, the narration. The poetic style but down to hearth message and very practical and real. Is a beautiful way of defining the darkest evils of living and funny and witty commentaries of real people and real behavoir. Jung was a huge fan as Faust has many of his psicological theories right. He uses the quotes as reality in his books.

Also interesting the intro with the dialogue between director and dramaturg. It really captures what a good story/ film is.

“Stop making love to your misery,
It eats away at you like a vulture!

“Body and soul ... fit so well together
yet they are eternally in contention.”

“Oh my, but art is long
and our life is fleeting.”

“That which issues from the heart alone,
Will bend the hearts of others to your own.”

“Mothers! That word’s like a blow!
Why am I so affected by it?” (Jung uses this sentence in his book of the collective unconcious.)

“In the end, you are exactly--what you are.
Put on a wig with a million curls,
put the highest heeled boots on your feet,
yet you remain in the end just what you are.”

"A paradise should florish here.
This is the vision that inspires me
This is my wisdom's final word
That they, who must defent their freedom everyday
Deserve to live lifes that are trully free.

So here, beset my danger
each should spend a life of honest effords to the end.
A happy throng.
If only I could see, upon free land, a people trully free.
Then to the passing moment I might say:
You are so beautiful, I bed you stay!
The traces of my life could never be effaces from human memory.
AS I anticipate my vision, this is the moment of my highest blish"

[Joe Richardson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is by far my favorite translation of Faust. The Mueller translation is complete, and opts for clarity instead over matching the exact lyrical pattern of the original. Lines that were incoherent in other versions are filled with meaning here. However the most impressive part about this version is that the humor shines through. That has to be the hardest part to capture and here it reads effortlessly.

[Seward Park Branch Library, NYPL · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd read part one once before, years ago, and was very *meh* about it. The translation, possibly? I think so... This Mueller translation must have delivered the goods since after reading it again, I'm pleased to report that I have more of an appreciation for it. Part 2? I've never read Part 2 before. So, let me tell you this : it's a god damned circus, and I'm not gonna pretend to you good people that I understood or even ENJOYED the second part, in full. I can't help but think that it bears rereading, yet, the chances of that happening? Well, I wouldn't rule it out altogether, but it won't be on my list of things to do in the near future.

In any case, I felt it was time to revisit Goethe's magnum opus since it seemed like a good follow up to Paul Hazard's book I finished last week. Faust is the European intellectual grown cold towards life. Life itself seems nothing but a shadow of memories of youth and vigor. And of course, his lifelong devotion to knowledge has yielded nothing, as knowledge (or truth, rather) in it's Modern European conception made dizzy by critical jealousy, it can be nothing if not a conglomeration of errors strung together. This numerical, causal, figuration of knowledge where truth can only dumbly mirror revelations of natural science (in simple hind-sight, of course!) could be illustrated by a passage from Mephistopheles thusly,

'Yes, yes, and then comes the philosopher,
sure as rain, explaining, explaining:
it had to be so, how else could it be?
First comes one,
and then comes two,
and then three and four come due;
and if the one and two hadn't come,
three and four would come undone!

What a round of applause that gets from the students—
and yet, not one of them ever became a weaver.'

I think of George Eliot's Casaubon from Middlemarch... To write a history, a philosophy could be nothing other than a 'Key to All Mythologies', a mere stringing together of the stars, to create constellations of the past. Of course this 'stringing together' is folly, as any conception of truth in the big-wide-world can only be a random narrative rendering of constituent parts which can really only be gathered, collected and stored... yes, 'facts'. But what to do with them? All that is tangible remains in the senses, and sensual pleasure and mere comfort seems the only way out of this thankless task of the pursuit of knowledge. This is precisely what Mephistopheles promises to Faust—the simple sensual pleasure of the naive and childish in order to forget the infinite striving to which humankind is cursed. Yet, simplicity and contentment through it (while not always evil in itself) comes in many kinds, and not all are for Faust. I was particularly struck by Mephistopheles advice to Faust to recover youth as,

'Get yourself to a country field,
start hoeing,
start digging,
confine yourself and your thoughts
to a narrow sphere of reference,
eat the simple foods you raise,
live with your beasts of burden as a beast,
be proud to manure the fields with your own dung.'

Yet Faust rejects this immediately as too narrow an existence for a man such as himself. As a result the reader quickly understands that 'Faust' is not going to end with the simple lessons of 'Candide', but try to wrestle with Plato's problem of the 'City of Pigs', that is, humankind's passion for a life beyond mere existence, lofty strivings both brilliant and arrogant. No, the simple life is not for Faust, yet Faust's particular simple pleasure in Part one is Lust, to which poor Gretchen falls victim.

Actually, Gretchen is merely Faust's first victim. In his wake of passion Faust is also responsible for the deaths of Baucis and Philemon, that dear old couple, and (in a round about way) for Euphorion, the lovechild between Helen and himself which was mean to be the marriage of Romantic and Classical ideals. Faust seems to screw up an awful lot, and I think Goethe means for us to forgive him as he is forgiven and accepted into Heaven at the end of Part 2. He is to be forgiven simply because he 'tried'? Am I oversimplifying things here??? Was it not his worldliness, striving, and meddling in the affairs of others which caused him to commit transgressions? I am either not understanding this fully, or I am simply just not buying it. Besides, Greek Classicism can do just fine without your whiny Nordic Romanticism.

I am being unfair, of course. There's lots of Goethe's message that must be heeded. That we must enjoy life and its attending passions... something which is neatly stated at the end of one of Faust's long passages in Part 2, that,

'In this [waterfall] I see a mirror of human striving.
Consider, and it's easily understood:
life is not light, but the refracted color.'

OK, that's alright with me I guess. But the Protestant Christian overtones in this work give me the creeps, and, believe me, I'm not even one to balk at religion!

And you know what? That's all I really want to get into right about now, 'cause this work has my brain well and truly fried. I'll be the first to admit that I have probably failed to understand the depth of its substance, but I am not sure I care all that much. This work is so tightly wound it'd take an essay the length of a research paper to unwind the whole thing... and... well... I was never any good at


—AF

[Bumbles · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book was solid, though I don’t think my review holds much merit because I do firmly believe that this an academic text that needs to be evaluated to extract the full meaning of it. I read this nonchalantly and leisurely, hence my assessment of the novel I don’t think hold too much weight. That being said though, from what I can remember I did like it but I didn’t love it.
I think it depicts moral quandary’s well. The thing I liked most was that it rhymed. Unlike other great translated works (like quite a few versions of inferno), It’s nice because it makes you appreciate the writing a bit more.
Faust trying to find meaning in his life was interesting and one of the highlights of the play.