Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Summer 1882–Winter 1883/84) by Friedrich Nietzsche

Abstract

Reviewed by: Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Summer 1882–Winter 1883/84) by Friedrich Nietzsche Paul Bishop Friedrich Nietzsche. Unpublished Fragments from the Period ofThus Spoke Zarathustra (Summer 1882–Winter 1883/84). Translated, with an afterword, by Paul S. Loeb and David F. Tinsley. The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche 14. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019. Pp. x + 880. Paper, $28.00. Begun by Ernst Behler and Bernd Magnus, and now under the editorial direction of Alan D. Schrift and Duncan Large, Stanford University Press’s ambitious project to offer in nineteen volumes a complete translation of the fifteen-volume Kritische Studienausgabe of Nietzsche’s works is proceeding apace. Volume 14 corresponds to volume 10 of the KSA and, while its first fragment demonstrates the need for its helpful editorial apparatus to make sense of these texts, its second raises more general questions about translation (and, in this case, how to translate the pronoun man). These questions are discussed at some length in the “Translators’ Afterword” provided by Paul S. Loeb and David F. Tinsley. In a section entitled “Our Philosophy of Language,” Loeb and Tinsley note that their own approach has much in common with that of R. Kevin Hill and Michael A. Scarpitti in their “Note on the Text and Translation” included in their recent translation of the material known as The Will to Power (London: Penguin Books, 2017), and they quote approvingly Clancy Martin’s summary of the challenges facing the translation of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra in particular. As Loeb and Tinsley observe, the very term ‘translate’ and its German equivalents, übersetzen and übertragen, connote a sense of “carrying something over or across a barrier or divider”—in this context, across “the vast ocean” separating Nietzsche’s nineteenth-century German and twenty-first-century American English (724). In part, navigating this ocean involves attention to the historical context of Nietzsche’s language and the concomitant need to reimagine the science, technology, and fashion of the nineteenth century; in part, it involves tackling problems faced by any translator of German, including that tricky third-person singular universal pronoun man. Rather than following Walter Kaufmann’s preference for the singular universal third-person English pronoun ‘one,’ Loeb and Tinsley substitute the pronominal plural universal ‘we’ (along with its possessive determiner ‘our’ for sein) (726). And their solutions to such problems as inflection, modal particles, and singular universals are equally pragmatic. In fact, Loeb and Tinsley provide a short glossary that summarizes their choices of some important terms in Zarathustra, including Empfindung (best captured in the sense Nietzsche most often uses it as “feeling,” but in a cognitive sense rendered as “perception” or “sensation”); Gemüth (a term undergoing a transition in Nietzsche’s time from designating the home of all mental faculties to its more narrow sense of the faculty of feeling and perception); and höhere Menschen / kleine Menschen (translated respectively as “superior” and “puny” human beings). Which brings us to the biggest and, of course, the most difficult challenge—how to translate not just Mensch but Übermensch? Loeb and Tinsley confess that, up until twenty years ago, their preferred translation of Mensch would have been the equivalent designation “man” with the possessive determiner “his,” yet they realize that English usage nowadays requires it be rendered in its nongendered form as “human” or “human being” (749). Within the etymology of Übermensch and its variants, its adjectival and adverbial form übermenschlich predominates, beginning in the sixteenth century with the theologian Wendelin Steinbach, while by Nietzsche’s time it had become the standard term to describe powers or abilities exceeding human capability (750). In fact, Loeb and Tinsley distinguish three different ways in which Nietzsche uses the philosophical concept of superhumans, which they call the supernatural, superior-individual, and superior-species uses (757). Critical of the suggestion that the term has Goethean connotations, either as an echo of the famous “Study” scene of Faust (771), or in Carlyle’s sense in recognizing Goethe in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) as one of the “Great Men” (767–69), Loeb and Tinsley claim that Nietzsche intended his new Zarathustrian concept as “a...