Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Faust: The First Part of the Tragedy. Trans. Margaret Kirby. Indianapolis: Focus/Hackett, 2015. 194 pp.

To translate a text requires a unique skill set involving knowledge of the subject, acquaintance with the targeted material, and the keenest technical facility for rendering the idiom of one language into another. Translating Goethe's Faust is all the more daunting because it requires a clear understanding of the German Enlightenment as well as of the cultural and philosophical underpinnings of this monumental work. Moreover, any new translation of Faust is doubly problematic because it invariably lends itself to comparisons with previous successful editions: the Walter Kaufmann, Peter Salm, and Barker Fairley versions of the sixties (Doubleday, 1961); the Walter Arndt and Cyrus Hamlin Faust from the seventies (Norton, 1976); the more recent David Constantine edition (Penguin, 2004), the sumptuously illustrated John Anster and Henry Clarke version (Calla, 2013), the recently revised Martin Greenberg version (Yale University Press, 2014, originally 1992), and sundry other Fausts. Aware of such pitfalls, Margaret Kirby thankfully provides us with an introduction to her new translation that lays out her perspective and methodology. In large strokes, Kirby's introduction focuses on Faust's feelings of confinement, his alienation from nature, and his misplaced dependence on knowledge, “discursive reason,” and “academic learning” (xii). Despite these feelings, Faust, as Kirby points out, is curiously charmed by Gretchen's satisfaction with the nearly cloistered living conditions in which he finds her room and even allows “that there is something of substance in finitude” (l. 1338; xiii). Kirby also points to the irony that Gretchen feels similarly confined both physically and mentally while imprisoned. But unlike Faust's nearly existential angst, her feelings of entrapment are strictly the result of her own transgressions, for which she says she will pay, one way or the other (ll. 4544–49; xv).

However enlightening this argument might be, Kirby nonetheless seems not to understand precisely just how negatively Faust's feelings truly affect him; in fact, they have made him something of a manic-depressive.