In 1821, a partial English verse translation of Faust (Part One) was published anonymously by the London publisher Thomas Boosey and Sons, with illustrations by the German engraver Moritz Retzsch. This translation was attributed to the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Frederick Burwick and James C. McKusick in their 2007 Oxford University Press edition, Faustus: From the German of Goethe, Translated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.[3] In a letter dated 4 September 1820, Goethe wrote to his son August that Coleridge was translating Faust.[4] However, this attribution is controversial: Roger Paulin, William St. Clair, and Elinor Shaffer provide a lengthy rebuttal to Burwick and McKusick, offering evidence including Coleridge's repeated denials that he had ever translated Faustus and arguing that Goethe's letter to his son was based on misinformation from a third party.[5]
Coleridge's fellow Romantic Percy Bysshe Shelley produced admired[6] fragments of a translation first publishing Part One Scene II in The Liberal magazine in 1822, with "Scene I" (in the original, the "Prologue in Heaven") being published in the first edition of his Posthumous Poems by Mary Shelley in 1824.[7]
- In 1828, at the age of twenty, Gérard de Nerval published a French translation of Goethe's Faust.
- In 1850, Anna Swanwick released an English translation of Part One. In 1878, she published a translation of Part Two. Her translation is considered among the best.[8]
- In 1870–71, Bayard Taylor published an English translation in the original metres. This translation, which he is best known for, is considered one of the finest and consistently remained in print for a century.[9]
- Calvin Thomas: Part One (1892) and Part Two (1897) for D. C. Heath.
- Alice Raphael: Part One (1930) for Jonathan Cape.[10]
- Mori Ōgai: 1913 both parts into Japanese.
- Guo Moruo: Part One (1928) and Part Two (1947) into Chinese.[11]
- Philosopher Walter Kaufmann was also known for an English translation of Faust, presenting Part One in its entirety, with selections from Part Two, and omitted scenes extensively summarized. Kaufmann's version preserves Goethe's metres and rhyme schemes, but objected to translating all of Part Two into English, believing that "To let Goethe speak English is one thing; to transpose into English his attempt to imitate Greek poetry in German is another."[6]
- Phillip Wayne: Part One (1949) and Part Two (1959) for Penguin Books.[12]
- Louis MacNeice: In 1949, the BBC commissioned an abridged translation for radio. It was published in 1952.
In August 1950, Boris Pasternak's Russian translation of the first part led him to be attacked in the Soviet literary journal Novy Mir. The attack read in part,
... the translator clearly distorts Goethe's ideas... in order to defend the reactionary theory of 'pure art' ... he introduces an aesthetic and individualist flavor into the text... attributes a reactionary idea to Goethe... distorts the social and philosophical meaning...[13]
In response, Pasternak wrote to Ariadna Èfron, the exiled daughter of Marina Tsvetaeva:
There was some alarm when my Faust was torn to pieces in Novy mir on the basis that supposedly the gods, angels, witches, spirits, the madness of poor Gretchen and everything 'irrational' was rendered too well, whereas Goethe's progressive ideas (which ones?) were left in the shade and unattended.[14]
- Peter Salm: Faust, First Part (1962) for Bantam Books.[15]
- Randall Jarrell: Part One (1976) for Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- Walter Arndt: Faust: A Tragedy (1976) for W. W. Norton & Company.
- Stuart Atkins: Faust I & II, Volume 2: Goethe's Collected Works (1984) for Princeton University Press.[16]
- David Luke: Part One (1987) and Part Two (1994) for Oxford University Press.
- Martin Greenberg : Part One (1992) and Part Two (1998) for Yale University Press. He has been credited with capturing the poetic feel of the original.[17]
- John R. Williams: Part One (1999) and Part Two (2007) for Wordsworth Editions.[18]
- David Constantine: Part One (2005) and Part Two (2009) for Penguin Books.[19]
- Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner: Part One (2020) for Deep Vellum Books, with illustrations by Fowzia Karimi.[20]
