THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA A BOOK FOR ALL AND NONE
EDITOR’S PREFACE
Zarathustra is by far Nietzsche’s most popular book, but Nietzsche himself never witnessed its success. The first three parts, each composed in about ten days, were at first published separately, and scarcely sold at all. Of Part Four, Nietzsche had only a few copies printed privately; and the first public edition was held up at the last moment in 1891 when his family feared that it would be confiscated on a charge of blasphemy. By then Nietzsche was insane and unaware of what was happening. Part Four appeared in 1892, and it was not confiscated. The first edition of the whole work followed not long after.
Zarathustra is as different from its reputation as its author is different from the widely reproduced busts and pictures commissioned by his sister. Her grandiose conception of the heroic strikes us as childish and has provoked the reaction, understandably enough, that Nietzsche was really a mere petit rentier. But perhaps there are more kinds of valor than are dreamed of by most of Nietzsche’s admirers and detractors. And the most important single clue to Zarathustra is that it is the work of an utterly lonely man.
He is shy, about five-foot-eight, but a little stooped, almost blind, reserved, unaffected, and especially polite; he lives in modest boarding houses in Sils Maria, Nizza, Mentone, Rome, Turin. This is how Stefan Zweig brings him to life for us: “Carefully the myopic man sits down to a table; carefully, the man with the sensitive stomach considers every item on the menu: whether the tea is not too strong, the food not spiced too much, for every mistake in his diet upsets his sensitive digestion, and every transgression in his nourishment wreaks havoc with his quivering nerves for days. No glass of wine, no glass of beer, no alcohol, no coffee at his place, no cigar and no cigarette after his meal, nothing that stimulates, refreshes, or rests him: only the short meager meal and a little urbane, unprofound conversation in a soft voice with an occasional neighbor (as a man speaks who for years has been unused to talking and is afraid of being asked too much).
“And up again into the small, narrow, modest, coldly furnished chambre garnie, where innumerable notes, pages, writings, and proofs are piled up on the table, but no flower, no decoration, scarcely a book and rarely a letter. Back in a corner, a heavy and graceless wooden trunk, his only possession, with the two shirts and the other worn suit. Otherwise only books and manuscripts, and on a tray innumerable bottles and jars and potions: against the migraines, which often render him all but senseless for hours, against his stomach cramps, against spasmodic vomiting, against the slothful intestines, and above all the dreadful sedatives against his insomnia, chloral hydrate and Veronal. A frightful arsenal of poisons and drugs, yet the only helpers in the empty silence of this strange room in which he never rests except in brief and artificially conquered sleep. Wrapped in his overcoat and a woolen scarf (for the wretched stove smokes only and does not give warmth), his fingers freezing, his double glasses pressed close to the paper, his hurried hand writes for hours—words the dim eyes can hardly decipher. For hours he sits like this and writes until his eyes burn.”
That is the framework, which changes little wherever he is. But his letters seem to reveal another dimension, for at times they are shrill and strange and remind us of his vitriolic remark about Jesus: it is regrettable that no Dostoevski lived near him. Who else could do justice to this weird, paradoxical personality? Yet the clue to these letters, as also to Zarathustra and some of the last books, is that they are the work of a thoroughly lonely man. Sometimes they are really less letters than fantastic fragments out of the soul’s dialogue with itself. Now pleasant and polite, now such that arrogance is far too mild a word—and yet his feeling of his own importance, painfully pronounced even in some very early letters, was of course not as insane as it must have appeared at times to those to whom he wrote. Resigned that those surrounding him had no idea who he was, and invariably kind to his social and intellectual inferiors, he sometimes felt doubly hurt that those who ought to have understood him really had less respect for him than his most casual acquaintances. Book after book—and either no response, or some kind words, which were far more unkind than any serious criticism, or even good advice, or pity, worst of all. Is it surprising that on rare occasions, when he was sufficiently provoked, we find appeals to his old-fashioned sense of honor, even his brief military service, and at one point the idea that he must challenge a man to a duel with pistols? For that matter, he once wrote a close friend: “The barrel of a pistol is for me at the moment a source of relatively agreeable thoughts.”
Then there are his several hasty proposals of marriage, apparently followed by a real sense of relief when the suggestion was refused politely. The proposals may seem quite fantastic, the more so because, except in the case of Lou Salomé, no really deep feelings were involved. But a few times he was desperate enough to grasp at any possibility at all of rescue from the sea of his solitude.
In his letters these dramatic outbursts are relatively exceptional. But the histrionics of Zarathustra should be seen in the same light. For impulses that others vent upon their wives or friends, or at a party, perhaps over drinks, Nietzsche had no other outlet. In Nizza, where he wrote Part Three of Zarathustra, he met a young man, Dr. Paneth, who had read the published portion and was eager to talk with the author. On December 26, 1883, Paneth wrote home: “There is not a trace of false pathos or the prophet’s pose in him, as I had rather feared after his last work. Instead his manner is completely inoffensive and natural. We began a very banal conversation about the climate, living accommodations, and the like. Then he told me, but without the least affectation or conceit, that he always felt himself to have a task and that now, as far as his eyes would permit it, he wanted to get out of himself and work up whatever might be in him.”
We might wish that he had taken out his histrionics on Paneth and spared us some of the melodrama in Zarathustra. In places, of course, the writing is superb and only a pedant could prefer a drabber style. But often painfully adolescent emotions distract our attention from ideas that we cannot dismiss as immature at all. For that matter, adolescence is not simply immaturity; it also marks a breakdown of communication, a failure in human relations, and generally the first deep taste of solitude. And what we find again and again in Zarathustra are the typical emotions with which a boy tries to compensate himself.
Nietzsche’s apparent blindness to these faults and his extravagant praise of the book in some of his last works are understandable. His condition had become even more unbearable as time went on; and we should also keep in mind not only the complete failure of the book to elicit any adequate response or understanding, but also the frantic sense of inspiration which had marked the rapid writing of the first three parts. Moreover, others find far lesser obstacles sufficient excuse for creating nothing. Nietzsche had every reason for not writing anything—the doctors, for example, told him not to use his eyes for any length of time, and he often wrote for ten hours at a time—and fashioned work on work, making his suffering and his torments the occasion for new insights.
After all has been said, Zarathustra still cries out to be blue-penciled; and if it were more compact, it would be more lucid too. Even so, there are few works to match its wealth of ideas, the abundance of profound suggestions, the epigrams, the wit. What distinguishes Zarathustra is the profusion of “sapphires in the mud.” But what the book loses artistically and philosophically by never having been critically edited by its author, it gains as a uniquely personal record.
In a passage that is quoted again as the motto of Part Three, Zarathustra asks: “Who among you can laugh and be elevated at the same time?” The fusion of seriousness and satire, pathos and pun, is as characteristic of the message as it is of the style of the book. This modern blend of the sublime and the ridiculous places the work somewhere between the Second Part of Faust and Joyce’s Ulysses—both of which, after all, might also have profited from further editing—and it helps to account for Nietzsche’s a
dmiration for Heine.
This overflowing sense of humor, which prefers even a poor joke to no joke at all, runs counter to the popular images of Nietzsche—not only to the grim creation of his sister, but also to the piteous portrait of Stefan Zweig, who was, in this respect, still too much under the influence of Bertram’s Nietzsche: Attempt at a Mythology. Nietzsche had the sense of humor which Stefan George and his minions, very much including Bertram, lacked; and if Zarathustra occasionally excels George’s austere prophetic affectation, he soon laughs at his own failings and punctures his pathos, like Heine, whom George hated. The puncture, however, does not give the impression of diffident self-consciousness and a morbid fear of self-betrayal, but rather of that Dionysian exuberance which Zarathustra celebrates.
Nietzsche’s fate in the English-speaking world has been rather unkind, in spite of, or perhaps even in some measure because of, the ebullient enthusiasm of some of the early English and American Nietzscheans. He has rarely been accorded that perceptive understanding which is relatively common among the French. And when we look back today, one of the main reasons must be sought in the inadequacies of some of the early translations, particularly of Zarathustra. For one thing, they completely misrepresent the mood of the original—beginning, but unfortunately not ending, with their many unjustified archaisms, their “thou” and “ye” with the clumsy attendant verb forms, and their whole misguided effort to approximate the King James Bible. As if Zarathustra’s attacks on the spirit of gravity and his praise of “light feet” were not among the leitmotifs of the book! In fact, this alone makes the work bearable.
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:How it, to a dance-girl, like,
Doth bow and bend and on its haunches bob,
—One doth it too, when one view’th it long!—
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 cit
ed, 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.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: First Part
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.