2: Which Edition of Doctor Faustus Should I Buy?
There are currently two English editions of
Doctor Faustus available on the American market: the 1948 translation by H.T. Lowe-Porter published by Everyman’s Library (ISBN 978-0-679-40996-0), and the 1999 translation by John E. Woods published by Vintage (ISBN 978-0-375-70116-0). The choice between the two is not difficult. Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter deserves enormous credit for having translated
Doctor Faustus quickly and (considering the work’s immense linguistic difficulties) more or less accurately. But she had to do so under ruthless deadline pressure and without recourse to decades of philological scholarship that would have helped identify Mann’s literary borrowings and gloss the precise meaning of some of his more arcane vocabulary. The John E. Woods translation is therefore preferable and should be chosen by any contemporary reader.
1Readers interested in a more comprehensive analysis of the differences between the Lowe-Porter and Woods translations should consult David Horton, Thomas Mann in English: A Study in Literary Translation (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).In German, a bewildering number of editions have appeared over the years with Thomas Mann’s lifelong publishing house, S. Fischer. All recent ones follow one of two different reference texts: the Gesammelte Werke (GW) edition published between 1960 and 1974, or the Große kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe (GKFA) edition, publication of which has been ongoing since 2001. (The volume containing Doctor Faustus came out in 2007).
Among academics, it is a subject of some debate which of these two reference texts should be preferred. In a scene that could have been taken straight from a Mann novel, I once witnessed two professors get into a shouting match over this question at an otherwise eminently respectable literature conference in Zurich. And in defense of these two gentlemen, the differences between the two versions are indeed significant. For one thing, the GW edition reproduces the text of the 1947 “Stockholm edition,” the newer GKFA version the 1948 “Vienna edition.” (Both editions, however, also reproduce the Author’s Note containing Mann’s nod to Arnold Schoenberg, which wasn’t included until the “Suhrkamp edition” published later in 1948.) In the months that passed between the publication of the Stockholm and Vienna editions, Mann not only fixed many typographical errors but also made significant cuts, especially in chapters VIII and IX, which reduced the overall length of the novel by around twenty pages. The GKFA edition is thus shorter than the GW edition.
In addition, Ruprecht Wimmer and Stephan Stachorski, the editors of the GKFA Doktor Faustus, made some contentious editorial interventions. For instance, they restored the date that Serenus Zeitblom gives as the starting point of his biographical project to “May 27, 1943,” just as it had been in all early editions of Doctor Faustus, even though most scholars agree that this was due to an error in the manuscript. The GW had therefore silently corrected the date to “May 23, 1943”—the day on which Mann, too, began writing his novel. The editors also changed the non-sensical phrase Fugengewicht der Akkorde (fugal weight of the chords) in chapter VIII to read Eigengewicht der Akkorde (inherent weight of the chords), the phrasing used by Theodor W. Adorno in the handwritten letter from which Mann got these words.
Despite my own disagreement with these particular changes, all page references to the German edition in this
Reader’s Guide are to the GKFA edition. I recommend that a reader interested in perusing the text in the original language (or just in comparing key passages to the English translation) purchase the paperback edition that bears the subtitle “In der Fassung der Großen kommentierten Frankfurter Ausgabe” (ISBN 978-3-596-90403-7). I have two reasons for favoring the GKFA. First, it is now preferred by the majority of scholars.
2Academics about to embark on their first forays into Thomas Mann scholarship (as well as undergraduates condemned to write a research paper on Doctor Faustus) may want to make note that the scholarly convention is to refer to volumes from the GW edition by Roman numerals, to ones from the GKFA edition by Arabic numerals. Thus, a reference to the first page of Doctor Faustus would appear as “(VI: 9)” if the GW edition is being quoted and as “(10.1: 11)” if the GKFA edition is being quoted. Second, Wimmer and Stachorski did yeoman’s work in preparing the commentary volume for the GKFA edition. It is more than a thousand pages long and informs almost every aspect of the much shorter commentary I created for the present book. To key my paginations to a different edition than theirs would have been a sign of profound disrespect.
My choice creates some additional problems, however. When John E. Woods carried out his English translation in the late 1990s, the GKFA was not yet available. His reference text was thus the GW. This creates the unusual situation of a translated version that includes passages cut from the now-standard edition in the original language. For reasons of concision, I have chosen not to highlight all the discrepancies in my commentary. Readers might be interested in knowing, however, that if one of my comments is keyed to a German page number that is higher than nine hundred (and therefore to an appendix in the GKFA commentary volume), the passage in question was cut by Mann in 1948 as being non-essential to the novel.