Finished Goethe's Faust, Part One, on the jet home. And I left it in the plane seat pocket! So you will get no exact quotes from me tonight.
Anyway, the translator is Walter Kaufmann, and I think he was a good translator, so far as I can tell.
But I really think his introduction is misleading. He wanted to make Goethe into too much of a forerunner of Nietzsche. Specifically, Kaufmann declares that there is no message to Faust, and that Goethe, while having no philosophy, nonetheless had a "beyond good and evil" point of view toward morality.
No big sprawling work of art stays on message consistently, but surely Goethe is dwelling upon the dire consequences of falsely manipulating someone into loving you.
I was very struck, this time, how Gretchen's dungeon scene reminded me of Ophelia's mad scene in Hamlet.
Love - lie to get it -
and live to regret it.
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