Book description
In 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.
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.
