Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Faustus
From the German of Goethe
Edited by Frederick Burwick and James C. McKusick
360pp. Oxford University Press. £85.
978 0 19 922968 0
When Charles Lamb heard, in the summer of 1814, that his old friend Samuel
Taylor Coleridge had been asked to translate Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s
dark masterwork Faust into English, he could hardly contain his horror. “I
counsel thee”, Lamb wrote to Coleridge on August 23, “to let it alone . . .
how canst thou translate the language of cat-monkeys? Fie on such
fantasies!” To Lamb, the surreal banter between Faust and the mob of
half-human meerkats he meets in the “Witch’s Kitchen” was a metaphor for the
meaninglessness of Goethe’s work. For nearly two centuries, the literary
world has believed that Lamb’s intervention was decisive, or at least that
it coincided with Coleridge’s own resolution not to pursue the project. “I
need not tell you”, Coleridge wrote twenty years later in his Table Talk,
“that I never put pen to paper as a translator of Faust.”
Romantic scholars have long puzzled over the contradiction between Coleridge’s
insistence that he “never put pen to paper” and Goethe’s own conviction that
the troubled author of “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
was in fact hard at work on the project. In September 1820, Goethe wrote to
his son, August, confidently stating that Coleridge was well under way with
a translation. Six years later, in his diary, he hints that he has seen a
finished version. The discrepancy between Coleridge’s and Goethe’s
assertions has quietly continued to niggle as one of the great riddles in
Coleridge scholarship. Among the many questions is why a poet, whose
reputation and psyche had suffered for decades from a failure to complete
promised and promising literary projects, should disown an achievement of
such scale and significance? A further question is: if such a translation
had indeed ever been produced, what happened to it?
The solution to the mystery, according to Frederick Burwick and James C.
McKusick, the editors of this provocative new edition Faustus: From the
German of Goethe, translated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “was there in plain
sight all along”. Their book represents the climax of a scholarly journey
that began in 1971, when the American scholar Paul M. Zall stumbled across a
neglected translation of Goethe’s verse drama, anonymously published in 1821
by the bookseller Thomas Boosey. Zall was startled by what he felt were
inimitable Coleridgean rhythms in the translation, and he advanced a thesis
that the lost work was perhaps never missing at all, but merely disguised
under a cloak of anonymity. At the time, Zall had little more to go on than
instinct, and he knew it would be difficult to convince his peers. In
addition to Coleridge’s emphatic claim that he never undertook the work, the
poet left a long trail of disparaging remarks about Faust: “there is neither
caus-ation nor progression” in the writing, he insisted; “Faust himself is
dull and meaningless”; “there is no whole in the poem”; “a large part of the
work is to me very flat”. But for Zall, the stylistic similarities between
the so-called “Boosey” translation and Coleridge’s earlier tragedies Remorse
(1813) and Zapolya (1817), were too striking to ignore. “’If it is not by
Coleridge”, Zall concluded, “then there was an imitator at large who
deserves better of posterity than unsung anonymity.”
After decades of examining the evidence, Burwick and McKusick have returned to
Zall’s contention, presenting for the first time an authoritative and
compelling case for Coleridge as the author of the anonymous 1821
translation. Their argument, laid out in an elegant introduction to the
volume and followed through in enlightening annotations, and a sophisticated
appendix devoted to an electronic analysis of the text, relies on a
comprehensive knowledge of and sensitivity to Coleridge’s creative habits,
reinforced by a formidable apparatus of literary forensics. The result is a
work of great scholarship which promises to reconfigure our understanding
not only of the life and works of a major English writer, but of that
writer’s complex role in European cultural commerce.
On a local level, the edition brings into focus a few of the gaps in
Coleridge’s own chronology, during the crucial years between the composition
of Biographia Literaria (1814) and Aids to Reflection (1823), while at the
same time shedding light on how Goethe’s work was received in England. If
the editors are right, the story would go something like this. In August
1814, Lord Byron’s publisher, John Murray, approached Coleridge, whose
reputation as a poet of the demonic was by then well established, and
invited him to translate Goethe’s infamous drama in exchange for £100.
Though regarded by Coleridge as “humiliatingly low”, the fee was
nevertheless agreed by the end of summer, with payment to be sent by Murray
immediately on “delivery of the last Mss Sheet”, either to the poet’s wife,
or, intriguingly, to Coleridge’s former partner in the “pantisocratic”
scheme to establish a utopia on the banks of the Susquehanna River in
Pennsylvania, the newly appointed Poet Laureate, Robert Southey.
Committed to what he convinced himself was, despite its many flaws, a work of
“genuine and original Genius”, Coleridge sequestered himself in a “Cottage 5
miles from Bath, in order to be perfectly out of Reach of Interruption”.
There, in his suitably Faustian exile, he established a daily regimen of
writing and revision, working from 9am to 8pm. After little over a month his
spirit was crushed, and, by October 16, he had abandoned the project
altogether as being, as he would later tell Byron, “highly obnoxious to the
taste and Principles of the present righteous English public”. And there the
enterprise rested until 1820, when two rival publishers, Johann Heinrich
Bohte and Thomas Boosey and Sons, each released translated extracts from
Faust to accompany a set of drawings by the celebrated German artist Morris
Retzsch. So unexpectedly successful were these competing volumes of English
fragments, that Boosey determined to produce a fresh translation of Goethe’s
entire work, and for that task there was only one man.
Why would Coleridge take on the commission in 1821, having failed to complete
it in 1814; and if he did, why did he not acknowledge the work, instead of
publishing it anonymously? To meet these and other questions, Burwick’s
introduction offers intriguing theories. Boosey’s proposition to Coleridge
in 1820, Burwick points out, would have coincided with the publication in
Blackwood’s Magazine that year of some 1,600 lines of translation from Faust
by John Anster, a twenty-seven-year-old Irish barrister. A symbiotic soul by
nature, Coleridge might have regarded the prospect of collaborating with
Anster, whom he later met on several occasions, as the psychological
incentive he needed to help complete the project, thus reinscribing an
artistic pattern of dependence established first with William Wordsworth
twenty-three years earlier.
The question why Coleridge should have wished to conceal his role in the
enterprise is less easily answered. McKusick has recently proposed that
Coleridge may have dishonestly taken two advances, accepting first a fee
from John Murray in 1814 and then one from Thomas Boosey in 1821, and would
therefore have needed to hide his involvement in the Boosey edition. But the
evidence, including a search of Murray’s account, doesn’t support any
deception of this sort. The terms of Coleridge’s unfulfilled agreement with
Murray were clear: that payment would come only after the delivery of the
manuscript. Coleridge’s continued connection with Murray, who went on to
publish Christabel in 1816, suggests there was no ill will between them, and
no attempt by Coleridge to avoid the publisher.
A more compelling reason for Coleridge not to put his name on the volume is
that he did not want Goethe’s reputation as the voice of unorthodox
religious and moral opinions to tarnish his own, or to influence the
reception of his recently published Lay Sermons, or that of the forthcoming
Aids to Reflection. But the runaway success of Bohte’s and Boosey’s
selections of 1820 must have gone some way to consoling Coleridge that the
cultural climate had sufficiently changed since Murray’s original overture,
and that Goethe’s name was no longer dangerous. The fact that Goethe knew
that Coleridge was engaged in translating his work, while many of
Coleridge’s contemporaries seem to have been left in the dark, reminds one
of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling’s response to the allegations that
swirled around Coleridge in the days after his death, that he had
plagiarized from Schelling in writing Biographia Literaria. “I gladly offer
to him”, Schelling wrote of Coleridge’s incorporation of his work, “those
things which he has borrowed from my works and been sharply, far too
sharply, reprimanded by his countrymen for having neglected to mention my
name.” One wonders whether the caricature of Coleridge as a plagiarizing
procrastinator is one that he countenanced, if not cultivated, at home,
while at the same time he was cultivating among his European counterparts a
more competent and serious identity.
Whatever the translator’s motivation for concealing his hand in preparing the
volume, the resemblance between the texture of the anonymous 1821 work and
the contours of Coleridge’s poetic voice is remarkable. What distinguishes
the Boosey edition from previous efforts in English is its overwhelming
dependence on dramatic blank verse. We know that Coleridge himself had
wished to see Faust transposed “poetically as for the stage”, and it wasn’t
long before reviewers openly suspected that Coleridge was behind the effort.
The translation in question is approximately half the length of Goethe’s
original and is comprised of compressed plot summaries in prose, interrupted
by verse vignettes. There is an agility to the translation which reminds one
of the difference between the stodgy urbanity of Alexander Pope’s
translation of Homer and the organic intensity of George Chapman’s. Compare,
for instance, Anster’s stiff rendering of lines from Faust’s meditation in
the “Forest and Cave” scene:
And when before my eye the pure moon walks
High over-head, diffusing a soft light,
Then from the rocks, and over the damp wood,
The pale bright shadows of the ancient times
Before me seem to love, and mitigate
The too severe delight of earnest thought!
with the more soulful, sinewy cadence of those being credited to Coleridge:
There may I gaze upon
The still moon wandering through the pathless heaven;
While on the rocky ramparts, from the damp
Moist bushes, rise the forms of ages past
In silvery majesty, and moderate
The too wild luxury of silent thought.
For ease of cross-reference, the editors have brought together all the
necessary texts, including Anster’s contribution to Blackwood’s Magazine,
both sets of extracts published in 1820 by the publishers Bohte and Boosey
(translated by Daniel Boileau and George Soane, respectively), as well as
all twenty-six of Retzsch’s drawings. A palimpsest of translation, the
edition allows readers to assess the strength of the text that is being
attributed to Coleridge, measured against a range of forgotten voices.
Burwick’s comprehensive identification of Coleridgean echoes, not only from
works published before Faust first appeared in 1808 but from works to which
another translator would not have had access, is astonishing and persuasive.
Not every comparison is equally convincing, however; the link, for instance,
of “Oh, thou great Spirit”, from the 1821 translation to Coleridge’s
concluding couplet in the early sonnet “To William Lisle Bowles”, which
begins with the invocation “Like that great Spirit”, hinges on a phrase that
is arguably too familiar to carry the case. Similarly, there will be some
readers who will regard McKusick’s confidence that his stylometric analysis
of the work, which is limited to analysing the “relative frequency of
word-lengths and functional keywords”, is comparable to “fingerprinting or
DNA analysis”, as a much exaggerated claim. But there is little doubt that
the preponderance of evidence assembled in this magisterial edition falls
heavily in favour of naming Coleridge as the anonymous translator of the
Boosey volume. If T. S. Eliot was right, that every time a new work of
literature is introduced into the canon, all previous works must adjust
themselves to accommodate the new arrival, the recovery of Coleridge’s
time-concealed masterpiece promises to trigger a ripple of realignments
right across both English and European Romanticism.
Kelly Grovier's collection of poems, A Lens in the Palm, is published
this month, and his literary biography of London's Newgate prison will
appear this summer.
Perhaps the poet reviewer would also like to grapple with the theological and related religious debates involving the two Romantics, to enhance his excellent and stimulating piece.Some day, in the future.Specifically to unravel the relentless grip of religious beliefs on the creative imagination.
Girdhar Rathi, Delhi, India