TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
Why a new translation of Nietzsche’s masterpiece Also sprach Zarathustra? There are three other English translations of the book: the first by Thomas Common, made at the end of the nineteenth century, and then two others, undertaken almost simultaneously in the 1950s by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale.
Over the decades, Walter Kaufmann’s has proved to be the most popular translation. The first time I read Thus Spoke Zarathustra, when I was a high school student in Calgary, Alberta, I read Kaufmann’s translation. But for all its strengths, Kaufmann’s edition takes large and often unjustified liberties with Nietzsche’s text. While translating this book, I occasionally felt that Nietzsche needed an editor: Fifty years after Nietzsche died (and thus could no longer control any editorial decisions) Kaufmann took it upon himself to become this editor. Thus Kaufmann made paragraphs where there were none before, changed punctuation, sometimes changed words, and in places altered both the literal and the philosophical meaning of Nietzsche’s text. In many cases he had good reasons: Nietzsche is always inflammatory, and Kaufmann was damping the flame of a thinker who was at Kaufmann’s time strongly associated with Hitler’s rhetoric and with Nazism in general. But in this translation, with Nietzsche’s alleged anti-Semitism and war mongering thoroughly debunked, I have been able to be true to the metaphors Nietzsche actually used and the language he actually wrote.
Some mistakes in Kaufmann’s translation are a consequence of the unreliable German edition of Thus Spoke Zarathustra available to him. Hollingdale worked with the same flawed edition. Happily for my purposes, a thoroughly revised and corrected edition of Also sprach Zarathustra has since become available, and the present translation has benefited from it.
Like Kaufmann’s, this translation began as a revision of the Thomas Common edition. But, also like Kaufmann, I quickly became so frustrated with Common that I started again from scratch. (Common’s translation suffers from large and systematic problems made worse by the fact that he worked with a particularly poor German edition of the work.) That said, all three of us—Kaufmann, Hollingdale, and now Martin-have a real debt to Common. He hits a lot of bad notes, but now and then he finds a line that rings true, and we all steal it from him. The same holds, in my own case, for the best words, phrases, and even sentences of Kaufmann and Hollingdale. Accordingly this translation is a kind of collaboration among the four of us that retains, I hope, the voice of Nietzsche, although it is inevitably tuned to and by my own ear. Here I would like to thank Common, Hollingdale, and Kaufmann: Without their work this translation would have many more weaknesses than it presently has, and many fewer handsome lines.
My coeditors and I decided that we would not translate the notorious word Übermensch, which was translated accurately by Hollingdale as “superman” and inaccurately by Kaufmann as “overman.” (Kaufmann avoided “superman” because he was worried that the concept would be trivialized in the minds of Nietzsche’s American readers by the popular comic book hero.) How the Übermensch fits into Nietzsche’s larger philosophical project has been a matter of scholarly debate for years, and the debate shows no signs of ending. Probably the best way to sort out what Nietzsche means by Übermensch is to read the book. The concept is introduced early in Zarathustra but is developed throughout the book, and the good reader will resist coming to hasty conclusions about its meaning.
Nietzsche loves puns: I have captured only a few of them. When I have missed a pun entirely, I have tried to indicate that fact in the footnotes. English cannot easily accommodate Nietzsche’s gender-neutral formulations, which he usually prefers, reserving the male-or female-gendered words for emphasis or for a particular point about the sexes. For example, in English we can use the gender-neutral construction of “one” (as in “one says”), but it is clumsy and often sounds forced. Therefore I have followed the practice of previous translators and generally used “man” in place of “one.” As a result, this translation makes Nietzsche appear much more gender-focused than he is in the original German. Contrary to popular myth, Nietzsche was not a sexist. Even Übermensch should be “superhuman,” not “super man.”
This translation has benefited greatly from the many improvements suggested by Kathleen M. Higgins and Robert C. Solomon. My deepest thanks to both of them.
I dedicate this translation to my daughters, Zelly and Margaret.
—Clancy Martin