The Land of Nowhere

Re: Goethe translations - this is very tricky. There's a flowery Victorian one which manages to bowlderize like mad and completely botches the wit and verve, then there's a 20th century literal one that ruins the poetry, and then there's my personal favorite which was actually written for the RSC who staged Faust I and Faust II (very very rare to stage both) and had playwright Howard Brenton have a go at it. Brenton had someone do a word-by-word translation for him to countercheck, and then made poetry out of it. Now, because this was a version explicitly written to be staged, he cut several scenes in both plays, but it's still my favourite and the best I've found in English, and it's available on kindle. (Published by Nick Hern Books, London.) Importantly, it does keep the wit and the satire and - imo as always - provides a sense as to why for Germans, this is THE Faust, and hardly anyone outside of English literature specialists knows Marlowe's version.

The reason why I know this is that I actually saw it performed on stage, and the way they went into the opening scene, the "prologue in the theatre" (where the director, the poet and the actor/funny person get into a hilarious debate that shows you Goethe had to run a theatre in Weimar as well as being a writer and that the principles remain the same throughout the centuries) was to let the three actors (who later become God, Faust and Mephisto, respectively, which is something the famous Gründgens production did first) just start in their every day clothes on stage while the audience was still filling in, and you could feel that the audience, most of whom probably didn't know the play, were unsure at first whether this was real or the play but just went with it.