The Portable Nietzsche (14 page)

To be sure,
Zarathustra
abounds in allusions to the Bible, most of them highly irreverent, but just these have been missed for the most part by Thomas Common. His version, nevertheless, was considered a sufficient improvement over Alexander Tille's earlier attempt to merit inclusion in the “Authorized English Translation of the Complete Works”; and while some of Common's other efforts were supplanted by slightly better translations, his
Zarathustra
survived,
faute de mieux.
For that matter, the book comes close to being untranslatable.

What is one to do with Nietzsche's constant plays on words? Say,
in der rechten Wissen-Gewissenschaft gibt es nichts grosses und nichts kleines.
This can probably be salvaged only for the eye, not for the ear, with “the conscience of science.” But then almost anything would be better than Common's “true knowing-knowledge.” Such passages, and there are many, make us wonder whether he had little German and less English. More often than not, he either overlooks a play on words or misunderstands it, and in both cases makes nonsense of Nietzsche. What is the point, to give a final example, of Nietzsche's derision of German writing, once “plain language” is substituted for “German”? One can sympathize with the translator, but one cannot understand or discuss Nietzsche on the basis of the versions hitherto available.

The problems encountered in translating
Zarathustra
are tremendous. Where Nietzsche does not deliberately bypass idioms in favor of coinages, he makes fun of them—now by taking them literally, then again by varying them slightly. Here too he is a dedicated enemy of all convention, intent on exposing the stupidity and arbitrariness of custom. This linguistic iconoclasm greatly impressed Christian Morgenstern and helped to inspire his celebrated
Galgenlieder
, in which similar aims are pursued more systematically.

Nietzsche, like Morgenstern a generation later, even creates a new animal when he speaks of
Pöbel-Schwindhunde
.
Windhund
means greyhound but, more to the point, is often used to designate a person without brains or character. Yet
Wind
, the wind, is celebrated in this passage, and so the first part of the animal's name had to be varied to underline the opprobrium. What kind of animal should the translator create? A weathercock is the same sort of person as a
Windhund
(he turns with the wind) and permits the coinage of blether-cock. Hardly a major triumph, but few works of world literature can rival
Zarathustra
in its abundance of coinages, some of them clearly prompted by the feeling that the worst coinage is still better than the best cliché. And this lightheartedness is an essential aspect of Nietzsche.

Many of Nietzsche's plays on words are, of course, extremely suggestive. To give one example among scores, there is his play on
Eheschliessen
,
Ehebrechen, Ehe-biegen, Ehe-lügen
, in section 24 of “Old and New Tablets.” Here the old translations did not even try, and it is surely scant compensation when Common gratuitously introduces, elsewhere in the book, “sumpter asses and assesses” or coins “baddest” in a passage in which Nietzsche says “most evil.” In fact, Nietzsche devoted one-third of his Genealogy of Morals to his distinction between “bad” and “evil.”

The poems in
Zarathustra
present a weird blend of passion and whimsy, but the difference between “Oh, everything human is strange” and “O human hubbub, thou wonderful thing!” in the hitherto standard translation is still considerable. Or consider the fate of two perfectly straightforward lines at the end of “The Song of Melancholy” : “That I should banned be/From all the trueness!” And two chapters later Common gives us these lines:

In fact, Common still doth it in the next chapter: “How it bobbeth, the blessed one, the home-returning one, in its purple saddles!”

It may be ungracious, though hardly un-Nietzschean, to ridicule such faults. But in the English-speaking world,
Zarathustra
has been read, written about, and discussed for decades on the basis of such travesties, and most criticisms of the style have no relevance whatever to the original. A few thrusts at those who exposed Nietzsche to so many thrusts may therefore be defensible—in defense of Nietzsche.

For that matter, the new translation here offered certainly does not do justice to him either. Probably no translation could; and perhaps the faults of his predecessors are really a comfort to the translator who can ask to have his work compared with theirs as well as with the original. Or is the spirit of
Zarathustra
with its celebration of laughter contagious? After all, most of the plays on words have no ulterior motive whatever. Must we have a justification for laughing?

Much of what is most untranslatable is an expression of that
Übermut
which Nietzsche associates with the
Übermensch:
a lightness of mind, a prankish exuberance—though the term can also designate that overbearing which the Greeks called
hybris.
In any case, such plays on words must be kept in translation: how else is the reader to know which remarks are inspired primarily by the possibility of a pun or a daring rhyme? And robbed of its rapidly shifting style, clothed in archaic solemnity,
Zarathustra
would become a different work—like Faulkner done into the King's English. Nietzsche's writing, too, is occasionally downright bad, but at its best—superb.

The often elusive ideas of the book cannot be explained briefly, apart from the text. The editor's notes, however, which introduce each of the four parts, may facilitate a preliminary orientation, aid the reader in finding passages for which he may be looking, and provide a miniature commentary.

Only one of Zarathustra's notions shall be mentioned here: the eternal recurrence of the same events. In the plot this thought becomes more and more central as the work progresses, yet it is not an afterthought. Nietzsche himself, in
Ecce Homo,
called it “the basic conception of the work” which had struck him in August 1881; and, as a matter of fact, he first formulated it in
The Gay Science
, the book immediately preceding
Zarathustra.
As long as Nietzsche was misunderstood as a Darwinist who expected the improvement of the human race in the course of evolution, this conception was considered a stumbling block, and Nietzsche was gratuitously charged with gross self-contradiction. But Nietzsche himself rejected the evolutionary misinterpretation as the fabrication of “scholarly oxen.” And while he was mistaken in believing that the eternal recurrence must be accepted as an ineluctable implication of impartial science, its personal meaning for him is expressed very well in
Ecce Homo
, in the sentence already cited, where he calls it the “highest formula of affirmation which is at all attainable.” The eternal recurrence of his solitude and despair and of all the agonies of his tormented body! And yet it was not his own recurrence that he found hardest to accept, but that of the small man too. For the existence of paltriness and pettiness seemed meaningless even after he had succeeded in giving meaning to his own inherently meaningless suffering. Were not his work and his love of his work and his joy in it inseparable from his tortures? And man is capable of standing superhuman suffering if only he feels sure that there is some point and purpose to it, while much less pain will seem intolerable if devoid of meaning.

Zarathustra
is not only a mine of ideas but also a major work of literature and a personal triumph.

EDITOR'S NOTE

 

Prologue
: Zarathustra speaks of the death of God and proclaims the overman. Faith in God is dead as a matter of cultural fact, and any “meaning” of life in the sense of a supernatural purpose is gone. Now it is up to man to give his life meaning by raising himself above the animals and the all-too-human. What else is human nature but a euphemism for inertia, cultural conditioning, and what we are before we make something of ourselves? Our so-called human nature is precisely what we should do well to overcome; and the man who has overcome it Zarathustra calls the overman.

Shaw has popularized the ironic word “superman,” which has since become associated with Nietzsche and the comics without ever losing its sarcastic tinge. In the present translation the older term, “overman,” has been reinstated: it may help to bring out the close relation between Nietzsche's conceptions of the overman and self-overcoming, and to recapture something of his rhapsodical play on the words “over” and “under,” particularly marked throughout the Prologue. Of the many “under” words, the German
untergehen
poses the greatest problem of translation: it is the ordinary word for the setting of the sun, and it also means “to perish”; but Nietzsche almost always uses it with the accent on “under”—either by way of echoing another “under” in the same sentence or, more often, by way of contrast with an “over” word, usually overman. Again and again, a smooth idiomatic translation would make nonsense of such passages, and “go under” seemed the least evil. After all, Zarathustra has no compunctions about worse linguistic sins.

“Over” words, some of them coinages, are common in this work, and
Übermensch
has to be understood in its context.
Mensch
means human being as opposed to animal, and what is called for is not a super-brute but a human being who has created for himself that unique position in the cosmos which the Bible considered his divine birthright. The meaning of life is thus found on earth, in
this
life, not as the inevitable outcome of evolution, which might well give us the “last man” instead, but in the few human beings who raise themselves above the all-too-human mass. In the first edition the Prologue had the title “On the Overman and the Last Man.” The latter invites comparison with Huxley's
Brave New World
and with Heidegger's famous discussion of
Das Man
in
Sein und Zeit.

1.
On the Three Metamorphoses:
To become more than an all-too-human animal man must become a creator. But this involves a break with previous norms. Beethoven, for example, creates new norms with his works. Yet this break is constructive only when accomplished not by one who wants to make things easy for himself, but by one who has previously subjected himself to the discipline of tradition. First comes the beast of burden, then the defiant lion, then creation. “Parting from our cause when it triumphs”—as Nietzsche did when Wagner triumphed in Bayreuth.

2.
On the Teachers of Virtue
: Sunny sarcasm. Our traditional virtues consecrate stereotyped mediocrity and make for sound sleep. But where sleep is the goal, life lacks meaning. To bring out the full meaning of the blasphemous final sentence, it may be well to quote from Stefan Zweig's essay, “Friedrich Nietzsche,” which is unsurpassed in its brief sketch of Nietzsche's way of life: “No devilish torture is lacking in this dreadful pandemonium of sickness: headaches, deafening, hammering headaches, which knock out the reeling Nietzsche for days and prostrate him on sofa and bed, stomach cramps with bloody vomiting, migraines, fevers, lack of appetite, weariness, hemorrhoids, constipation, chills, night sweat—a gruesome circle. In addition, there are his ‘three-quarters blind eyes,' which, at the least exertion, begin immediately to swell and fill with tears and grant the intellectual worker only ‘an hour and a half of vision a day.' But Nietzsche despises this hygiene of his body and works at his desk for ten hours, and for this excess his overheated brain takes revenge with raging headaches and a nervous overcharge; at night, when the body has long become weary, it does not permit itself to be turned off suddenly, but continues to burrow in visions and ideas until it is forcibly knocked out by opiates. But ever greater quantities are needed (in two months Nietzsche uses up fifty grams of chloral hydrate to purchase this handful of sleep); then the stomach refuses to pay so high a price and rebels. And now—vicious circle—spasmodic vomiting, new headaches which require new medicines, an inexorable, insatiable, passionate conflict of the infuriated organs, which throw the thorny ball of suffering to each other as in a mad game. Never a point of rest in this up and down, never an even stretch of contentment or a short month full of comfort and self-forgetfulness.” For Nietzsche, sleep was clearly not the end of life. Yet he could well say, “Blessed are the sleepy ones: for they shall soon drop off.”

3.
On the Afterworldly
: A literal translation of “metaphysicians”; but Zarathustra takes issue with all who deprecate this world for the greater glory of another world. The passage about the “leap” may seem to be aimed at Kierkegaard—of whom Nietzsche, however, heard only in 1888, too late to acquaint himself with the ideas of the Dane.

4.
On the Despisers of the Body
: The psychological analysis begun in the previous chapter is here carried further. The use of the term “ego” influenced Freud, via Georg Croddeck.

5.
On Enjoying and Suffering the Passions
(
Von den Freuden- und Leidenschaften
)
:
The passions, called evil because they are potentially destructive, can also be creatively employed and enjoyed. Unlike Kant, who had taught that “a collision of duties is unthinkable,” Nietzsche knows that a passion for justice or honesty may frequently conflict with other virtues. But even if Rembrandt was torn between his dedication to his art and his devotion to his family, who would wish that he had been less passionate a painter or poorer in compassion?

6.
On the Pale Criminal:
Too abstract to make sense to Nietzsche's first readers, including even his once close friend Rohde, much of this chapter now seems like reflections on Dostoevski's Raskolnikov. But Nietzsche had not yet discovered Dostoevski. And some of the psychological insights offered here go beyond Dostoevski.