Faust in a hat-box

Those Shelley letters turning up after 194 years reminded me that there's more stuff out there. For example we might never have had Shelley's translation of Plato's Symposium, and the remarkable accompanying essay, On the Manners of the Ancient Athenians, an argument for toleration of homosexuals written in 1819, for heaven's sake. Shelley accidently left that lot in Pisa, and it was missing for months. Fortunately he found it where it had fallen down the back of a roll-top desk, only a few days before he drowned. Otherwise it'd probably still be there.

Shelley seems to have started a novel about the French Revolution, Hubert Cauvin. He sometimes referred to it as if it were finished and ready to offer to a publisher. I doubt if he ever did finish it, because he later said that the defining great epic of his age would be a work written about the French Revolution. If he'd finished a novel on that theme, it might not have nagged at him so much in later life. And he might not have been so sure that he wasn't the person to write that epic. Still, even the beginning of a French Revolution novel would be interesting. The manuscript is out there. If it was up to me, I'd start looking in his last English residence, at Marlowe.

But there's more. Shelley was a pioneering translator of Goethe, possibly the first to provide a large chunk of Faust in English: the Walpurgisnacht scene. But it seems that he also oversaw a translation that was to have included the whole of Faust.

Mary Shelley's sister, Claire Claremont, was a talented person surrounded by genius, which must have been trying. She had stories published, but the real evidence of her talent is in her Journal and letters. (Almost the only sensible thing that Paul Foot ever said about Shelley is that men who start reading the original texts in this area tend to wind up falling in love with Claire. That's probably true.)

Anyway, Claire had some modest writing talent, and she needed money. Byron had lots of money, and had offered to commission a complete translation of Faust. Byron would never have given Claire the gig, because Byron loathed her, among other things for getting pregnant by him without subsequently disappearing, like the chambermaids he "fell on like a thunderbolt". He treated her with persistent and at times unbelievable cruelty that - well, for all his ability to charm, I've never quite liked Byron. Anyway, Shelley offered to find Byron a translator, and quietly gave the job to Claire.

Before passing Claire's English poetic version on to Byron, Shelley would - in his usual practice - have had a look at it, fixed mistakes and added occasional improvements. As he did with his cousin Medwin's Dante translations. Shelley found collaborative writing remarkably congenial. After this had been going on for some months, Shelley drowned and the arrangement must have stopped.

So somewhere out there there is a translation of all or a large part of Goethe's Faust, reviewed, improved, and authorised by Shelley. It has the same status as a Shelley work as the Pope-approved translation of Homer's Odyssey, in which the first draft was done by other poets but Pope polished the final text.

It's probably in a left-luggage room in Italy somewhere. (Or did Claire take it with her to Russia? Or back to England?) But one day, someone is going to open an old hat-box, or something, and there it will be. Faust, in English, in two handwritings.

Tell you what I really miss: Ovid's play, Medea. (Not to mention the Greeks.) But Medea is gone for good. Not Faust, though. Check your granny's hat-boxes!