Faust Part Two is Goethe's strange and fantastic completion of a story which he said he had long carried around in his mind 'like an inner fairytale'. Faust and Mephistopheles continue their wanderings, until Faust's sudden death, still in pursuit of the 'Eternal Feminine'.
Loosely connected with Part One and the German legend of Faust, Part Two is a dramatic epic rather than a strictly constructed drama. It is conceived as an act of homage to classical Greek culture but inspired above all by the world of storytelling and myth at the heart of the Greek tradition, as well as owing some of its material to the Arabian Nights tales.
David Luke's translation of Faust Part one won the European Poetry Translation Prize. Here he again imitates the varied sense-forms of the original, and provides a highly readable - and actable - translation.
