Faust, Part II

A major new translation of Goethe's Faust, Part Two - one of the greatest dramatic-poetic works in all of German literature - by award-winning poet and translator David ConstantineIn this sequel to Faust, Mephistopheles takes Faust on a journey through ancient Greek mythology, conjuring for him the insurpassably beautiful Helen of Troy, as well as the classical gods. Faust falls in love with and marries Helen, embodying for Goethe his 'imaginative longing to join poetically the Romantic Medievalism of the germanic West to the classical genius of the Greeks'. Further to the themes of redemption and salvation in this great drama, are Goethe's eerie premonitions of modern phenomena such as inflation and the creation of life by scientific synthesis.

“One of those great works of literature into which a writer has been able to combine his ranging preoccupations and understanding as he worked.”

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-A. S. Byatt, from the Preface

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.

'The corpse is prone and when the spirit flies I show her my entitlement, blood-signed' After the sorrowful loss of his beloved Gretchen, the soul-sold Faust is tempted by the demon Mephistopheles with the grandest distractions of politics and power. Eager for new sensations, Faust calls for a vision of the unsurpassed beauty of Helen of Troy, and then, overwhelmed, for her to be brought back from the underworld and delivered to him bodily. But even this does not bring contentment, or satisfy his appetite for fresh experience. Completed a few months before Goethe's death, the concluding part of his masterpiece is a rich and allusive work, weaving together a wealth of diverse philosophical ideas and influences, reworking the medieval myth of Dr Faustus and speculating upon the search for truth in the Age of Enlightenment. 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. Translated with an introduction and notes by David Constantine With a preface by A. S. Byatt

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