Intertextual links between Goethe‘s Faust (Part I) and philosophy and their (non)presence in Polish translations

Abstract

The paper assumes that the translation of Faust I should show the connections between a literary work and its philosophical allusions. Philosophy and literature try to give an answer to the same questions: about the sense of the world, life and science, about nature, but they evaluate it differently. Throughout his lifetime Goethe gained acquaintance with the Bible and the classics, and he spent a lot of time studying philosophical works of Paracelsus, Johannes Kepler, Heinrich Agrippa von Nettesheim, Swedenborg, alchemy and natural magic. The marks of his philosophical interest are to be found in many fragments of his Faust. On the other hand Faust influenced philosophy, for example the philosophy of Hegel or Nietzsche. The fragments of Polish translations indicate to the influence of philosophy on the translation, too (for example in a translation of the term “Übermensch” – Super- Human). the description method is based of the search of intertextual connections between the work of Goethe and the philosophical texts. In the paper the old Polish translations (of Walicki, Bielowski, Krajewski) as well as the newest Polish versions of Faust (of Buras and Pomorski) have been presented. The paper assumes that this work represents the core of Goethe’s philosophical thought, which is the reason of difficulties in translating into the Polish language and culture.