Faust and the furious

A row has broken out between scholars over Germany's most famous literary work and one of England's greatest Romantic poets.

Last November, Oxford University Press published a new English edition of Goethe's Faust, an enormous dramatic poem in two parts written between the early 1800s and Goethe's death in 1832. It portrays a thinking man who sells his soul to the Devil.

The volume, edited by two American scholars, Frederick Burwick and James C McKusick, would probably have gone unnoticed - except for the fact that they say this translation is by none other than the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (right), author of Kubla Khan and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

The translation itself appeared, anonymously, in 1821. Coleridge, a passionate Germanophile, had often expressed to friends and

publishers a desire to translate Faust. In 1814, it seems he was paid £100 by John Murray - Lord Byron's publisher - to do so.

It had been thought that Coleridge dropped the project. But after years of toil, Professors Burwick and McKusick are in no doubt that the translation is his. "I have spent an entire literary career studying Coleridge," Burwick has said, responding to recent, perhaps inevitable criticism of the claims. "I am not wrong."

The two men have undertaken painstaking cross-referencing within Coleridge's oeuvre, making use of stylometrics, a computer programme which analyses an author's use of language, and which tickles out, as it were, his or her stylistic DNA.

But in recent weeks the OUP publication has been attacked by three heavyweight British academics. Through a densely argued 35-page dossier, they