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 min-
ions, very much including Bertram, lacked; and if Zara-
thustra 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-con-
sciousness 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 pérhaps 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 Zarathus-
tra. 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 improve-
ment over Alexander Tille’s earlier attempt to merit in-
clusion in the “Authorized English Translation of the Com-
plete Works”; and while some of Common’s other efforts
were supplanted by slightly better translations, his Zara-
thustra 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 con-
science 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 conven-
tion, intent on exposing the stupidity and arbitrariness of
custom. This linguistic iconoclasm greatly impressed Chris-
tian Morgenstern and helped to inspire his celebrated
Galgenlieder, in which similar aims are pursued more sys-
tematically.
Nietzsche, like Morgenstern a generation later, even
creates a new animal when he speaks of Pébel-Schwind-
hunde. Windhund means grevhound but, more to the point,
is often used to designate a person without brains or char-
acter. 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 per-
mits 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, ex-
tremely suggestive. To give one example among scores,
there is his play on Eheschliessen, Ehebrechen, Ehe-biegen,
Ehe-liigen, 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, else-
where 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 pas-
sion and whimsy, but the difference between “Oh, every-
thing 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 Melan-
choly”: “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!— "
and 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 criti-
cisms 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 cer-
tainly does not do justice to him either. Probably no trans-
lation 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 laugh-
ter 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 Ubermut which Nietzsche associates with the Uber-
mensch: 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 be-
come a different work—like Faulkner done into the King’s
English. Nietzsche’s writing, too, is occasionally downright
bad, but at its best—superb.
Well worth a read.
dedicated to saturn where once sacred grove of Þórr stood
