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Jan. 29th, 2011 05:37 pmInteresting - the translation of Faust, Part 1 recently attributed to Coleridge, I don't know on how good authority, leaves out the only parts Shelley translates: the Prologue in Heaven and Walpurgisnacht. Presumably for the same reason they attracted Shelley, their paganism. Which means you can combine the two into one full Faust.
Well, almost full. Coleridge, or whoever, also leaves out the theater prologue on the grounds that it's silly and irrelevant. And he summarizes a number of scenes in prose - the version was just commissioned to provide the texts for a popular series of engravings and enough info to connect them.
Coleridge's was published in 1821. Shelley's version of "Walpurgisnacht" was in the first issue of The Liberal, I think, which was published right after Shelley's death in 1822. Conceivably a connection there, if only that Hunt & co. assumed including a sequence other translations were censoring out would fit the spirit of the journal.
Still, Byron was in contact with Coleridge pretty often before he left England in 1816 - he'd helped Coleridge get a play staged a couple years previous - and Coleridge had allegedly been contemplating a Faust translation c. 1813. Maybe Byron saw some of it and told Shelley about the omissions, exciting Shelley into translating those particular parts. Shelley basically spot-translated Faust aloud for Byron right before the latter wrote Manfred - I think Byron later commissioned Claire to make a written version for him? Though Byron did later say he'd never read Faust, despite its obviously being a huge influence on Manfred, Cain and The Deformed Transformed, citing that he'd just had bits read to him, which may preclude his having read anything by Coleridge. Though of course he wasn't above lying about that kind of thing.
The alleged Coleridge, in an 1824 reprint:
http://books.google.ca/books?id=r0s-AAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=faustus+goethe&hl=en&ei=aJBETbOdKous8AbVnICzAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false
Well, almost full. Coleridge, or whoever, also leaves out the theater prologue on the grounds that it's silly and irrelevant. And he summarizes a number of scenes in prose - the version was just commissioned to provide the texts for a popular series of engravings and enough info to connect them.
Coleridge's was published in 1821. Shelley's version of "Walpurgisnacht" was in the first issue of The Liberal, I think, which was published right after Shelley's death in 1822. Conceivably a connection there, if only that Hunt & co. assumed including a sequence other translations were censoring out would fit the spirit of the journal.
Still, Byron was in contact with Coleridge pretty often before he left England in 1816 - he'd helped Coleridge get a play staged a couple years previous - and Coleridge had allegedly been contemplating a Faust translation c. 1813. Maybe Byron saw some of it and told Shelley about the omissions, exciting Shelley into translating those particular parts. Shelley basically spot-translated Faust aloud for Byron right before the latter wrote Manfred - I think Byron later commissioned Claire to make a written version for him? Though Byron did later say he'd never read Faust, despite its obviously being a huge influence on Manfred, Cain and The Deformed Transformed, citing that he'd just had bits read to him, which may preclude his having read anything by Coleridge. Though of course he wasn't above lying about that kind of thing.
The alleged Coleridge, in an 1824 reprint:
http://books.google.ca/books?id=r0s-AAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=faustus+goethe&hl=en&ei=aJBETbOdKous8AbVnICzAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false
