The Anonymous 1821 Translation of Goetheas Faustus: A Cluster Analytic Approach
The scholars, Frederick Burwick and James McKusick, published at Oxford University Press, Faustus from the German of Goethe translated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 2007. This edition articulated the result that Samuel Taylor Coleridge is the actual translator of the anonymously published translation Faustus from the German of Goethe (London: Boosey: 1821). The present article tests that result. The approach to test this result is stylometric. Specifically, function word usage is selected as the stylometric criterion, and 80 function words are used to define a 73-dimensional function word frequency profile vector for each text in the corpus of Coleridge’s literary works and for a selection of works by a range of contemporary English authors. Each profile vector is a point in 80-dimensional vector space, and 5 different cluster analytic methods are used to determine the distribution of profile vectors in the space. If the result being tested is valid, then the profile for the 1821 translation should be closer in the space to works known to be by Coleridge than to works by the other authors. The cluster analytic results show, however, that this is not the case, and the conclusion is that the Burwick and McKusick result is falsified relative to the stylometric criterion and analytic methodology used. Where, in Popperian terms, falsification does not mean ‘prove to be false’. It means that evidence which contradicts a hypothesis has been presented, and it is up to the proposer of the hypothesis either to show that the evidence is inadmissible or irrelevant, or else to emend the hypothesis accordingly. The rest of the article is organized as follows. In section 1 we give the motivation for doing this work. In section 2 we provide a quick introduction to the 1821 Faustus translations that we hope will shed some light on the problem. In section 3 we discuss the previous attempts to attribute the 1821 Faustus to Coleridge. In section 4 we outline the methodology used to add
