Allusions to and citations of Richard Wagner abound in popular culture, but allusions to the Ring cycle are uniquely fraught. They assume some familiarity with a monumental work that resists easy pop cultural grinding up. This chapter traces different strategies employed by writers, performers, directors, and film composers to engage, whether humorously or seriously, with a work that is as difficult to cite as it is tempting to make grist for the pop-cultural mill.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Faust: The First Part of the Tragedy. Trans. Margaret Kirby. Indianapolis: Focus/Hackett, 2015. 194 pp.

To translate a text requires a unique skill set involving knowledge of the subject, acquaintance with the targeted material, and the keenest technical facility for rendering the idiom of one language into another. Translating Goethe's Faust is all the more daunting because it requires a clear understanding of the German Enlightenment as well as of the cultural and philosophical underpinnings of this monumental work. Moreover, any new translation of Faust is doubly problematic because it invariably lends itself to comparisons with previous successful editions: the Walter Kaufmann, Peter Salm, and Barker Fairley versions of the sixties (Doubleday, 1961); the Walter Arndt and Cyrus Hamlin Faust from the seventies (Norton, 1976); the more recent David Constantine edition (Penguin, 2004), the sumptuously illustrated John Anster and Henry Clarke version (Calla, 2013), the recently revised Martin Greenberg version (Yale University Press, 2014, originally 1992), and sundry other Fausts. Aware of such pitfalls, Margaret Kirby thankfully provides us with an introduction to her new translation that lays out her perspective and methodology. In large strokes, Kirby's introduction focuses on Faust's feelings of confinement, his alienation from nature, and his misplaced dependence on knowledge, “discursive reason,” and “academic learning” (xii). Despite these feelings, Faust, as Kirby points out, is curiously charmed by Gretchen's satisfaction with the nearly cloistered living conditions in which he finds her room and even allows “that there is something of substance in finitude” (l. 1338; xiii). Kirby also points to the irony that Gretchen feels similarly confined both physically and mentally while imprisoned. But unlike Faust's nearly existential angst, her feelings of entrapment are strictly the result of her own transgressions, for which she says she will pay, one way or the other (ll. 4544–49; xv).

However enlightening this argument might be, Kirby nonetheless seems not to understand precisely just how negatively Faust's feelings truly affect him; in fact, they have made him something of a manic-depressive.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: A Tragedy; Parts One and Two, Fully Revised. Trans. Martin Greenberg. Introduction by W. Daniel Wilson. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2014. 467 pp.

The new, fully revised translation of Faust by Martin Greenberg offers both parts of Goethe's drama in a single volume, which represents a bold publishing decision on the part of Yale University Press. Many translations of Faust, surely one of the most readily available works of German literature in English, have not bothered with the second part at all or have presented each part separately: Greenberg's original edition also appeared as separate-volume translations of Part I (1992) and Part II (1998), at price points of $19.00 and $19.50 respectively. The new, single-volume format thus provides an instructor of undergraduate literature courses the opportunity to place the whole of Faust into the hands of her students for only a few dollars more than what each of the previous edition's parts cost, thereby perhaps tempting them to read more than the customary “Great Books” course requirement of Part I.

One of the superior features of this new edition is the excellent “Introduction” by W. Daniel Wilson: it is a model of concision and eloquence. Within the space of only eight pages (plus notes), Wilson adequately summarizes Goethe's life history, places Faust into a thematic and structural context, and briefly describes the work's importance to the generations of readers since the early nineteenth century. Most significantly, he acknowledges that Faust presents moral issues that may disturb the reader, especially that “Goethe seems to let Faust off the hook” (xiii) by redeeming him, despite the monstrously evil acts he commits. Thus, Wilson anticipates some of the most difficult and off-putting issues that a reader new to Faust is about to encounter, acknowledging them without offering excuses or rationalizations. Wilson's contribution accomplishes precisely what an introduction should do by giving the reader everything she needs to enter into the work with a sufficient, but not overwhelming, context for appreciating it.

In his “Translator's Note,” Greenberg, quoting Wordsworth, states that his main purpose in this revision (as in the earlier edition of this translation) is “to provide an English Faust in ‘a language really used by men’” (xix); to update Wordsworth one is tempted to add “and by women.”