John Stuart Blackie (1809-1895): Translating Faust I in Scotland (1834)

This article examines the important contribution to literary relations between Scotland and Germany in the Vormärz period (1815-1848) made by the Scottish translator and cultural mediator of German literature, John Stuart Blackie (1809-1895). A Scottish Professor of Greek at the University of Edinburgh, Professor Blackie became the third British translator to publish a complete English translation of Goethe’s Faust I. His verse translation was first published in 1834 in Edinburgh (Blackwood), almost immediately after completing a long residency in Germany and Italy. The Faust translation was particularly well received, especially because of his extensive knowledge of the German language and culture, which he had acquired when studying at university in Göttingen and also Berlin during the years 1829 to 1831. A second revised edition of the translation followed in 1880.
Like Lord Francis Leveson Gower, the first producer of an English metrical translation of Faust I in 1823, Blackie made significant changes, for example, they both omitted the Prologue in Heaven scene because they thought it would cause religious offence. Of interest to the Vormärz period is that Blackie wrote in detail about his translation strategy using established but adapted translation metaphors. He conceptualised the translator as a creative figure, a Prometheus, who must breathe life into his new creation. His intention was not to transpose but to recast the original, and in doing so capture and “seize, if possible, the very soul and living power of the German” (Blackie, Faust, p. viii). For Blackie, translation was act of the bringing together the body and the soul of the text to create life. He posed a philosophical problem, a spirit-body dualism in translation. He explained that “we must beware of falling into poetical materialism, by making the spirit bend to the form, instead of allowing the matter to be kneaded and moulded into shape, by the plastic power of the indwelling spirit” (p. ix). In discussing his translation method, Blackie highlighted his concerns about nineteenth-century poetry translation in philosophical terms, focusing on the threat of poetic materialism and the dualism of the body and spirit in translation.
Blackie’s engagement with German literature through translation gives us more context about how Scottish Germanophiles responded to Thomas Carlyle’s essay ‘The State of German Literature’ (1827) in the 1830s, which was a call to revise the negative image of German literature in Britain.