Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Stella: A Play for Lovers. Translated by Susan E. Gustafson and Kristina Becker Malett. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2018. 105 pp.

Goethe's drama Stella, subtitled Ein Schauspiel für Liebende in fünf Akten, is a controversial work: featuring an unfaithful husband, two betrayed women, and an implied ménage à trois, its plot strikes the reader as decidedly modern. The same can be said of Susan E. Gustafson and Kristina Becker Malett's new translation of the play, which renders the language of the drama as vibrantly as the events it depicts. Although little-performed, Stella is a play that appeals to casual readers and serious scholars alike, and Gustafson and Becker Malett's fresh approach satisfies the often-divergent demands of both these groups.

There have been several previous translations of the play, most notably by Robert Browning and Frank Ryder in 1988, but Gustafson and Becker Malett's bills itself as one of the few to present the 1776 original in full. Gustafson and Becker Malett's translation has much to recommend it: by anglicizing the characters’ names (“Lucie,” for example, becomes “Lucy”), the translators make the work immediately accessible to an audience without any knowledge of German. They have also modernized the language somewhat, with the exasperated “Wo hat dich der Henker wieder?” uttered by the landlady being rendered as “Where the heck have you been?” (11). Similarly, “Mamachen,” spoken by the landlady's daughter to her mother, is translated as “mom” (17): while this may be slightly jarring to non-American readers, particularly in the context of an eighteenth-century text, it does bring a vivacity to the hustle and bustle of life in an inn. In turn, Stella's panicked, anxious monologues toward the end of the play demonstrate a real deftness on the part of the translators. Her distressed appeal to her “jammervolle Herz” is here rendered as “wretched heart” (53), which more clearly implies her miserable state than the “aching heart” given in Browning's translation (J. W. von Goethe, Early Verse Drama and Prose Plays, trans. R. Browning et al., Suhrkamp, 1995, 210). Indeed, this is one of the major strengths of this work: not only do Gustafson and Becker Malett manage to convey the sense of Goethe's text itself to the English-speaking reader, they also manage to develop a convincing style for each of the characters in the text.