Coleridge find puts Montana dean in limelight

MISSOULA – James McKusick expected to create a stir in literary circles when word got out about his discovery of a previously unknown Coleridge translation of Goethe’s “Faust.”

But after news coverage last week about McKusick’s sleuthing and his poetic find, the Davidson Honors College dean at the University of Montana found himself in the international spotlight.

Thursday morning, McKusick was interviewed on the BBC Radio morning show “Today.”

McKusick helped crack the case of a 36-year-old effort to prove that an 1820 anonymous commercial translation of the provocative German telling of the Faust legend was the work of famed British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Collaborating with a California-based colleague, Frederick Burwick, McKusick dug into archives to find several “smoking guns” to prove the translation was the work of Coleridge. At UM, McKusick used a computer analysis called stylometrics to determine the author’s “fingerprint” on the translation. Like a real fingerprint, all writers have a preference for certain words and use those words in patterns that make their style unmistakable. The computer analysis is yet another way to prove the author of the translation with a degree of “high probability,” he said.