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Goethe's Faust , Parts I and II (Abridged)
Goethe's Faust Parts I and II - Abridged Author:Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Louis MacNeice (Translator) This abridged translation of Goethe's Faust, by one of England's most distinguished poets, was originally commissioned by the BBC for broadcasting during the Goethe Centenary in 1949, and first published in 1952. Reducing by about one-third the total length of the play, Mr. MacNeice remains close to the letter and spirit of the original. — From t... more »he translator's preface: "The [abridged] version was first and foremost intended for broadcasting, which explains many of the cuts detailed at the end of the book [where the reader will find a list of the line numbers of all passages that were cut]. At the same time I suggest that an abridged version such as this (about 8,000 lines out of the original 12,000) may prove more acceptable to certain classes of reader than the full work with all its digressions and abandonments. It should be remembered that the original was written over a period of sixty years and that Goethe himself admitted that it needed cutting."« less