Goethe's Faust

The next scene takes place in Faust's study where the aging scholar, struggling with what he considers the vanity and uselessness of scientific, humanistic, and religious learning, turns to magic for the showering of infinite knowledge.

Frustrated, he ponders suicide, but rejects it as he hears the echo of nearby Easter celebrations begin.

In Faust's study, the poodle transforms into Mephistopheles, dressed as a travelling student who refuses to give his name.

Faust is surprised that Mephistopheles is bound by mystical laws, and from this reasons that he could make a pact.

Finding that she refuses to escape, Faust and Mephistopheles flee the dungeon, while voices from Heaven announce that Gretchen shall be saved – "Sie ist gerettet" – this differs from the harsher ending of Urfaust – "Sie ist gerichtet!"

However, God had won his wager from the Prologue (and thus Faust's soul) as the transcendental moment was derived from his righteous pursuits.

The first part represents the "small world" and takes place in Faust's own local, temporal milieu.

This translation was attributed to the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Frederick Burwick and James C. McKusick in their 2007 Oxford University Press edition, Faustus: From the German of Goethe, Translated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

[3] In a letter dated 4 September 1820, Goethe wrote to his son August that Coleridge was translating Faust.

[4] However, this attribution is controversial: Roger Paulin, William St. Clair, and Elinor Shaffer provide a lengthy rebuttal to Burwick and McKusick, offering evidence including Coleridge's repeated denials that he had ever translated Faustus and arguing that Goethe's letter to his son was based on misinformation from a third party.

[5] Coleridge's fellow Romantic Percy Bysshe Shelley produced admired[6] fragments of a translation first publishing Part One Scene II in The Liberal magazine in 1822, with "Scene I" (in the original, the "Prologue in Heaven") being published in the first edition of his Posthumous Poems by Mary Shelley in 1824.

[7] In August 1950, Boris Pasternak's Russian translation of the first part led him to be attacked in the Soviet literary journal Novy Mir.

The attack read in part, ... the translator clearly distorts Goethe's ideas... in order to defend the reactionary theory of 'pure art' ... he introduces an aesthetic and individualist flavor into the text... attributes a reactionary idea to Goethe... distorts the social and philosophical meaning...[13]In response, Pasternak wrote to Ariadna Efron, the exiled daughter of Marina Tsvetaeva: There was some alarm when my Faust was torn to pieces in Novy mir on the basis that supposedly the gods, angels, witches, spirits, the madness of poor Gretchen and everything 'irrational' was rendered too well, whereas Goethe's progressive ideas (which ones?)