|
The few translators who have attempted a Spanish verse translation of Goethe’s Faust for the most part fail to do justice to the metrical diversity of Goethe’s play and therefore they either altogether give up the idea of rendering Goethe’s play in poetry, e.g. Pedro Gálvez in 1984, or they create a traditionalist Spanish Faust poem with excessive liberties regarding its content, like, in 1882, Teodoro Llorente. Others have tried to fit Goethe’s verse in the Procrustean bed of unrhymed endecasílabos, which has forced them to abridge the original text in numerous passages (Valverde 1963). Moreover, some authors, such as Valverde and Silvetti Paz (1970), translate some passages of Goethe’s magnum opus into Spanish verses resembling unrhymed iambic pentameter, a rather unusual approach in Spanish poetry, but nevertheless surprisingly effective. The translation which clearly stands out is the one by Augusto Bunge (1926, 1949), who carefully studied and analyzed the metrical structure of Faust and created a Spanish version which imitates Goethe’s complex rhythms and rhyme patterns while remaining largely faithful to the German original.This article is the English version of “Los ritmos y la rima de la versificación goetheana en las versiones métricas del Fausto en español” by Stefan Beyer. It was not published on the print version of MonTI for reasons of space. The online version of MonTI does not suffer from these limitations, and this is our way of promoting plurilingualism.
|