Faust: Part One

Luke has done us all - including, if one may say so, Goethe - a potently good turn. We should take advantage of it.' D.J. Enright, Observera translation “for our time” without signs of strain.’ D. J. Enright, The Observer`At last! A translation of Goethe’s masterpiece which reads like a masterpiece in English. David Luke conveys the meaning, intellectual passion and Byronic raciness of the original. This is a poet’s as well as a scholar’s version, for David Luke has written original poems of great distinction.’ Stephen Spender, Spectator’scrupulous and well-informed, backed up by scholarly clarification of the text’s difficult history … one of the most spirited efforts to capture the great poetic drama’Independent’a translation of really poetic quality, preceded by an informative introduction and a most useful synopsis of the various stages of composition of the drama … This reissue is most welcome: for over and above having available for the non-Germanist an English version of this novel.‘The Classical Era’signs of struggle are remarkably few … The price he pays for rhyming is never too high, and the profits are immense. Michael Hamburger once noted that while Faust had been translated again and again, no single version had established itself as a standard text for the English-speaking world. With his Parts One and Two, both in Oxford University Press World’s Classics, Luke has provided us with exactly that.‘Times Literary Supplement

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) perhaps comes as close as any man to deserving the title of universal genius. Poet, dramatist, critic, scientist, administrator and novelist, he was born at Frankfurt-am-Main in 1749, the son of well-to-do parents with intellectual interests; and he studied at the University of Leipzig and at Strassburg, where he wrote a play which initiated the important Sturm und Drang movement. During the next five years he practiced law in Frankfurt and wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther, a remarkable novel autobiographical of one side of Goethe’s nature. In 1775 he

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