I haven't read Kaufman, but the Luke translation is a good one. With an annotated edition, it will probably have end notes rather than footnotes, so you'd have to keep flipping back (or, what I prefer, read them at the end of a scene/chapter - or just look for stuff that you're curious about!). If you want more of Goethe's weird interests but in a bit more accessible/less 'I am trying to write my Definitive work' form, I really recommend Elective Affinities - which basically takes the metaphor of 'chemistry' in romantic relationships and literalizes it (there's also Werther, which I think is good but a mega downer & can kinda get in your brain. My old prof said she stopped teaching it bc she could see some students were like, Too into it. Idk, people also get Too into Faust but that tends to be less bad... unless they are nazis bc, well, that is the tricky thing w/ Romanticism. You have all this really interesting humanism stuff but also... a dangerous nationalistic bent + naturalizing social relationships and hierarchy tends to go badly)