Faust, Part One

The original tale of moral destruction, in a brand-new translation: Faust is a man torn between the urges of the living world and the significance of moral living. He feels nothing, he lives for nothing, and thus engages in a wager with Mephistopheles, the devil himself. Goethe's master work shares the deep complexity of a human life, rife with pain, mistakes and dynamic complexity.
With Faust, the lushly lyrical and philosophically brilliant drama on which the poet spent almost his entire life, Goethe solidified himself as a major literary figure whose work would transcend time and space to create the modern world. Now, this brand-new, dynamic translation demands we ask of our world: who will win, humanity or Mephistopheles?

Born in 1749 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, Goethe gained international fame and renown as a novelist, poet, philosopher, scientist, academic, and statesman. The German philosopher Aether Schopenhauer named Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship one of the four greatest novels ever written, while the American philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson selected Goethe as one of six "representative men" in his work of the same name (along with Plato, Emanuel Swedenborg, Montaigne, Napoleon, and Shakespeare). Deep Vellum published a selection of Goethe's poetry, The Golden Goblet, in 2019.
Zsuzsanna Ozsváth is the Leah and Paul Lewis Chair of Holocaust Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas and Director of the Holocaust Studies Program. Ozsváth received her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, and her research focuses on aesthetics and ethics in German, Hungarian, and French literature. In 1992, she received the Milan Fust Prize, Hungary's most prestigious literary prize, with her co-translator, Frederick Turner, for Foamy Sky: The Major Poems of Miklos Radnoti (Princeton University Press, 1992).
Frederick Turner is Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. Turner received his B.Litt, a PhD-level terminal degree, from Oxford University, and his research considers poetry, aesthetics, and Shakespeare. He received the prestigious Milan Fust Prize with co-translator Zsuzsanna Ozsváth for Foamy Sky: The Major Poems of Miklos Radnoti (Princeton University Press) in 1992.