FBR 85: The safest way . . .

I've had a copy of Randall Jarrell's translation of Faust for quite a while. It's the FSG Noonday paper edition at $6.95, so how long is that? Last week I got hold of the 2000 edition of the same work, this one a hardcover with eleven illustrations by Peter Sis: the color cover and ten interior black and white "dot" drawings, particular to Sis's earlier work. I have loved the art of Peter Sis since I first saw it in the New York Times Book Review, and have a small collection of books, from Alphabet Soup on, but I never knew he did a Faust.

After receiving it (it cost a single penny — one cent — plus $3.99 shipping, can you believe it? One shameful penny for what might turn out to be a desert island book?), I was delighted to have an opportunity to read over Jarrell's work again. It is colloquial and almost slangy in parts, formal in others, and all around a solid piece of work. There are some exquisite scenes: Faust wanting to be young again, the Dungeon scene. One of the best things about the edition, however, is his wife's Afterword, "Faust and Randall Jarrell."

Mary von Schrader Jarrell gives the reader a first-hand picture of a major poet in the act of translating another major poet: "It was not done for riches, not for fame, not for a foundation grant; it was an assignment of the soul." Jarrell himself gave a more desperate reason: "At least, if I can't work on poetry of my own, I'm working on poetry better than my own . . . "

Being in the realm of poetry, in the country of words, was a necessary part of life for him, and I suspect for others of us as well. Elsewhere he quotes Goethe, who manages to combine the selfishness and selflessness of the artist in a beautiful epitaph:

"The safest way to avoid the world is through art; and the safest way to be linked to the world is through art."