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Goethe’s Faust is one of the greatest works
of Western literature. Goethe labored away at the
drama for sixty years—beginning it as a young man in
his early 20s, and finally completing it at the end
of his life in his 80s. In it, he takes the medieval
story of a man who makes a pact with the devil and
transforms it into a unique Romantic vision of human
striving. At a time in our culture when
everything is reduced to sound bytes and video
clips, Goethe’s massive text (as long as three
Hamlets) makes great demands on the attention
span. With this new translation, I have tried to
make this rich and challenging material a thrilling
ride for the audience from start to finish.
There are many existing English translations of
Goethe’s Faust, many done by reputable
scholars and published by esteemed publishing
houses. But despite this wealth of textual options,
Goethe’s Faust has yet to find its place
alongside Shakespeare and Molière on the American
stage. This paradox has been at the heart of my
desire to do a new translation of Goethe’s
masterpiece: I have strived to create a poetic
and stageworthy translation for the American
theatre.
Any translation of Faust must
first of all be poetic. Probably the greatest German
poet ever, Goethe employs a variety of verse forms
and rhyme schemes in Faust. Yet his language
is not rarefied or precious. Goethe’s German was
meant to be spoken—it pulses with life, emotion and
wit. His heightened use of language (like
Shakespeare’s) finds its fullest expression in the
mouth of a gifted actor, and any translation that
wants to be performed as well as read must take this
into account. The individual choices a translator
makes word by word, line by line, should cohere into
a vibrant whole, so that each thought flows with
rhythm and clarity. The audience should be swept
along with the excitement the text—its ability to
create not only thought, but character and emotion
as well.
After fifteen years translating German plays by
writers such as Kleist, Wedekind and Brecht, I have
been humbled to work on Goethe’s magnum opus over
the past three years. Because Goethe wrote the play
at so many different stages of his life, Faust
contains an infinite variety of tones, perspectives
and verse forms. In terms of my own approach to the
translation, I have tried to maintain the verse
forms throughout. Although Goethe uses rhyme through
most of the play, I’ve been selective in my use of
rhyme, as I find it hard for today’s audiences to
hear too much rhyme and still follow the thought. I
have employed rhyme strategically for a variety of
reasons: to help to coin an essential thought or
phrase; to mark the ending of a scene with a
Shakespearean rhymed couplet; to give the songs a
heightened lyrical quality (many of Goethe’s most
famous songs are found in the Gretchen episode); and
to give the magic spells and incantations their own
special ring.
I would never have taken on such a
daunting project alone. In working with director
David Herskovits and his company, Target Margin
Theater, I have had the luxury of developing the
translation over a three-year period. Each year we
have developed new material which is culminating
this year in a production of Goethe’s entire play.
In the first year we workshopped and produced the
first 2,600 lines of text under the title These
Very Serious Jokes (a phrase Goethe once used
ironically to refer to the play). I was able to
listen to my translation over and over again in
rehearsal, and had the luxury to adjust my word
choices in relation to what I learned in the hall.
The following year we presented the rest of Part One
by tackling the next 2,000 lines (the Gretchen
episode). This season, we are taking on the
difficult Part Two of the tragedy and will present
the play in its entirety.
The German classics hold untold riches for the
American theater, and yet sadly they remain far from
center-stage. A text as seminal as Goethe’s Faust
must be set loose from the page and be allowed to
find sensual life on the stage, for only there can
it achieve its truest, fullest expression.
DOUGLAS LANGWORTHY BIO
Douglas Langworthy is
currently Dramaturg and Director of Play Development
at McCarter Theatre in Princeton, NJ. He served as
Director of Literary Development and Dramaturgy at
the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for seven seasons
(1996-2003), where he served as dramaturg on the
world premieres of David Edgar’s Continental
Divide and Nilo Cruz’s Lorca in a Green Dress,
as well as new plays by Robert Schenkkan (Handler)
and Octavio Solis (Gibraltar and El Paso
Blue), and Jerry Turner’s new translation of
Ibsen’s Rosmersholm. While there he also
developed a new adaptation of Dumas’ The Three
Musketeers with Linda Alper and Penny Metropulos
and a new translation of Brecht’s The Good Person
of Szechuan, both for the 1999 season. In the
2004 season, he collaborated with director Ken
Albers on a new adaptation of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s
The Visit, and dramaturged the world premiere
of Oedipus Complex, a new adaptation by Frank
Galati based on the writings of Sophocles and
Freud. In his tenure at the Festival he served as
production dramaturg on over 25 productions.
Langworthy has translated fifteen plays from the
German, which include Spring Awakening by
Frank Wedekind, Medea by Hans Henny Jahnn,
and The Prince of Homburg, Penthesilea
and Amphitryon (National Theatre Translation
Fund Award) by Heinrich von Kleist and both
Quartet and Hamletmachine by Heiner
Müller. He is also the dramaturg for Target Margin
Theater in New York, for whom he is currently
translating Goethe’s Faust. For Target
Margin, he also co-wrote the libretto for The
Sandman, a new opera with music by Thomas
Cabaniss, and developed a new stage adaptation of
The Nutcracker, both based on stories by E.T.A.
Hoffmann. Other Target Margin productions on which
Langworthy served as dramaturg include Young
Goodman Brown, a new opera based on Nathaniel
Hawthorne with a libretto by Richard Foreman and a
score by Philip Johnston; Objects Lie on a Table,
Little Eyolf and Egypt, an adaptation
of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.
For The Acting Company in New York, he has
dramaturged Charles Smith’s new adaptation of Mark
Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson and Jeffrey
Hatcher’s Murders by Poe, adapted from the
short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. He is currently
working on the libretto for a new opera of Medea
based on his translation of Jahnn’s German version
of the tragedy, with music composed by Larry
Delinger. Other stage adaptations include In Dark
Times, a montage juxtaposing Bertolt Brecht’s
poems and songs with his 1947 testimony before the
House Un-American Activities Committee, and My
Dinner with Goethe, adapted from Goethe’s
writings about the theatre and his “Rules for
Actors.”
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