Faust, Part One: A New Translation with Illustrations

The deft and ingenious translators have succeeded at a formidable task: putting Goethe's German into a modern English idiom that adheres to the original rhyme scheme and keeps up with the constantly changing meters of the source. They've done so while keeping to a diction that people of our day would actually use - a major challenge considering that the work was composed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This book, the first half of the drama, comprises the heartrending tragedy of Gretchen, the unsophisticated girl whom Faust seduces, impregnates, and ultimately abandons as she's about to be executed for drowning her illegitimate infant. From the start we follow the mutually supportive and dependent relationship between Faust and Mephistopheles, his diabolical enabler and betrayer. It is Faust's tragedy too, but one he will survive to experience new epiphanies.Absorbing on the page, the work will spring to life on the stage, where indelible characters are stunned and impelled by magical devices, some created through stagecraft and some through the brilliance of language itself.