Well this wasn't very good.
Some beautiful poetry, but fragmentary and incoherent. Like what does the Gretchen story even have to do with Faust's wager? And Faust himself is a rather inconsistent character...
I don't think I'm going to bother with Part 2. .
Gretchen gives Faust love. Faust wants infinite knowledge, and Mephistopheles gives him the knowledge of the human heart, since he already knew everything intellectually.
>Some beautiful poetry, but fragmentary and incoherent
lol
I wish you dweebs would stop calling things 'incoherent', my backlog is big enough.
It literally is incoherent though. Goethe wrote the thing over a 30 year period in different phases.
I read in the introduction that he didn't even want to return to the thing until Schiller persuaded him to.
>reading faust translated
Don't even bother, imagine reading Hamlet in a german translation. Just stick to werther or something if you want goethe.
Yeah, I felt as if this might be the case. Sad.
Werther was absolutely brilliant to be fair.
I read Faust translated and I really really enjoyed it (the translation was good though, Goethe himself acknowledged it)
I found Werther very poor though, it gives a good overview of what some of the basic romantic ideas are, but that's it.
>I found Werther very poor though, it gives a good overview of what some of the basic romantic ideas are, but that's it.
I read Werther as the perfect satire of Romanticism.
I haven't read it, but I imagine this is the case for many works of high Romanticism. They can seem so exaggerated that they seem to mock he very style in which they are written.
Oh really? I doubt that it was Goethe's intention though, too early to be a satire
Byron, e.g., explicitly satirises the Romantic hero in Don Juan.
Why not? Goethe is obviously sympathetic to Werther, but it's not as if he's uncritical of him. Consider how pathetically botched his suicide is. The ending is all a bit "yeah, that was pretty senseless".
I also doubt it was satire, but it is rather easy for people unacquainted with Romantic conventions to interpret them so.
Also, some critics reads a sort of rebuke of Romance in his poem Isabella.
Faust is one of the greatest works of literature ever written, you pleb.
>I uncritically repeat what others tell me
sapere aude user
>
Disliking faust is literally a pleb litmus test
WOLFGANG WAS GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!!!
Real Hegel and Hoelderlin!! OR ELSE!
I found it a mainly aesthetically pleasing read. Even though I read it only once almost ten years ago, I can still recite some scenes almost verbatim without ever learning them by heart. They felt so powerfully eloquent, it somehow resonated with me like a good poem. I haven't read the english translation, so I l'm not sure how much of that is left, but as I mentioned earlier I'd expect it to be as shitty as Hamlet translated to german. Which I actually read when I was a teen. Never tried translated poetry again.
For the story alone, I wouldn't recommend Faust. I mean, the plot starts off pretty strong: god and mephisto's bet and faust's introduction as a conflicted being with "two souls in his chest". But it doesn't really hold up to what it promises. Somewhere after they leave Faust's study, it all goes to shit very fast, with a few short exceptions. And let's not talk about what kind of a mess Faust II is.
Also, I'd agree that Faust's character is inconsistent in that he seems somewhat different (horny imstead of brooding) after he drinks that rejuvenation potion, but I just assumed it had to do with, well, the potion.
>plebs can't into faust ii
lmao
What's the best translation my friends?
bloomy boy likes atkins
arndt comes with the best notes/commentary. super stilted at times though.
kaufmann is reader-friendly ish and interesting poetically but only has a little bit of part 2
oh and luke is generally well regarded/has potential to become the new "standard." well rounded. comes in two books though so you have to pay more if you buy physical copies.