BOOKS
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that he must have felt when he translated the
Agamemno.n-he
came
reluctantly at the invitation of the B.B.C. Furthermore he has, he tells
us, "next to no German," and no collaborator, even as expert a Ger–
manist as Ernest Stahl whom he had at his elbow, can fully offset that;
he is or was "somewhat prejudiced against Goethe"; he finds Part II
"incoherent" and, oddly enough, is of the opinion that "everyone
agrees"; he has "a blind spot for the Helena in general"; and he has his
reservations even
in
the Gretchen tragedy. All this puts him at a dis–
advantage for the job in hand. Where it shows up conspicuously
is
in
his evident uncertainty as to the style of
Faust-its
linguistic temper, its
quality of speech-which he may be said to recapture at one point only
to miss at another.
For example, in Mephistopheles' first speech in the Prologue in
Heaven he hits off the opening lines admirably:
Since you,
0
Lord, 'Once more approach and ask
If business down with us be light
or
heavy–
And in the past you've usually welcomed me–
That's why you see me also at your levee.
Only to mar the note lower down:
The little god of the world, one can't reshape, reshade him;
He
is
as strange today as that first day you made him,
where the manipulation of "reshape, reshade him" to rhyme with
"made him" is foreign both
to
Faust
and to Goethe and should have
been avoided.
It
cannot
be
said too strongly that the forcing of rhyme,
which is what MacNeice is cleverly doing here, is not felt once in the
upwards of twelve thousand lines of Goethe's poem. From beginning to
end the rhymes just come. And so they should
in
English. MacNeice
defends the retention of rhyme against those of his friends who wanted
him
to "tum the whole thing into blank verse or free verse" and he was
right in doing so. But his friends also knew what they were talking about,
having seen translation after translation made unpalatable with rhymes
that were contrived and artificial. The worthy Bayard Taylor probably
started it with that rigid adherence to prosody which produced things
like
this:
But would that I, on mountains grand,
Amid thy blessed light could stand,
With spirits through mountain-caverns hover,
Float in thy twilight the meadows over,
