Thus Spake Zarathustra [with Biographical Introduction]

Ich kenne die Deutche sprach ohne schwierigkeit, best english translation that I am aware of. have read Untermeier tanslation, a disaster, Kaufmann with all due respect too devoted, is OK if nothing else available, but Hollingsdale is a masterpiece, a true work of art. Sometimes it seems to me to excell the very original.

Salut. Peter

Obstinate, intrepid, emphatic, piercing, dismissive, entreating all apply to the Nietzsche's provocative masterpiece, masterfully translated with numerous less melodramatic choices in interpretation by the editors.

This wonderful Kaufmann translation of Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" I speak of speaks to what was spoke, not only in Zarathustra's speaking, but also what was spoke by Nietzsche that Kaufmann spoke in English speech, speaking only to English speakers in the way that Kaufmann spoke of what Nietzsche spoke Zarathustra to spake.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra (R.J. Hollingdale's translation) is quite simply one of the least enjoyable classics I've ever read. It was a chore to get through the 330+ pages and what I was constantly hoping would get better, never did. TSZ attempts to espouse many aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy through, for the most part, meaningless riddles and analogies. You won't understand even half of what Nietzsche's trying to tell you. When I read a book I expect to be able to at least understand the plot or message. TSZ was overall a waste of time.
There are a couple of redeeming points to consider. Nietzsche's "Superman" philosophy is interesting and he goes into some detail on the inadequacies of man today and what the future Superman will be like. According to Nietzsche, God created everything but then died sometime in the past out of pity for humanity's imperfections. The Superman race will one day come out of man and be perfection in mind and body. Also, Nietsche has unique viewpoints on many aspects of life: work, family, friendships, etc. The fraction of a time that Zarathustra speaks coherently, he's interesting.
The problem is, Zarathustra spends the vast majority of his time preaching in gibberish and poor poetry. 80% of the dozens of topics in TSZ are practically unreadable. I understand that the original work is German and many of Nietzsche's plays on words cannot be translated properly. However, I can't imagine even the original German prose making much sense to a fluent German speaker.
Here's an excerpt typical of the prose found throughout the novel, from the section "On the Blissful Islands": "Truly, I have gone my way through a hundred souls and through a hundred cradles and birth-pangs. I have taken many departures, I know the heart-breaking last hours. But my creative will, my destiny, wants it so. Or, to speak more honestly: my will wants precisely such a destiny. All feeling suffers in me and is in prison: but my willing always comes to me as my liberator and bringer of joy. Willing liberates: that is the true doctrine of will and freedom - thus Zarathustra teaches you. No more to will and no more to evaluate and no more to create! ah, that this great lassitude may ever stay far from me!"
Hmm, so he wants to will and create, but doesn't want to feel? What's his point? He's not making sense here. Now imagine 80% of the book written in mediocre prose like that and you have an idea of what you're getting into. It would have been far better if Nietzsche had simply written a clear one-paragraph summary of Zarathustra's point at the end of each section. Then you could go back and interpret better what Z was talking about. I've read a whole bunch of classics and have a large library of them. I consider my reading comprehension skills to be above-average. Yet this book ranks at or very near the bottom of my list. NOT recommended!

I'm writing for the penguin classics edition. It's not really about the book itself but the quality in which it was delivered. It came with the cover and back peeling out, apparently some stickers has been removed forcefully. While the content is fine, I'm not happy because penguin classics are not exactly durable as they are, and for it to come damaged in this way is unacceptable.

Exactly what I was expecting. I have read this before in a different format. Loaned it out several years ago, and it got lost and was never returned. This format is better than the copy I had prior.

I'm writing for the penguin classics edition. It's not really about the book itself but the quality in which it was delivered. It came with the cover and back peeling out, apparently some stickers has been removed forcefully. While the content is fine, I'm not happy because penguin classics are not exactly durable as they are, and for it to come damaged in this way is unacceptable.

Exactly what I was expecting. I have read this before in a different format. Loaned it out several years ago, and it got lost and was never returned. This format is better than the copy I had prior.

Friends:

After reading about 12,000 books in my life I decided to read this one next. Winter started today at our Ranch in the remote Sangre de Cristo mountain range of Colorado.

I used to snow ski with men who were direct reports to Adolph Hitler....... They seemed like nice people.

Google my name to Learn more......

Arthur Gerard Michael Baron von Boennighausen

It is a curiously old- fashioned book - is sort of Trumpian - anti-feminist bible - "go to women - bring a whip" - superman concept borrowed by the Nazis - sort of know ur enemy book for Christians - "God is Dead" is old now but was controversial in the 19th century - quaint and curious now!

“Hold your highest hopes holy,” says Nietzsche in one breath, and “God is dead” in another. For Nietzsche the creator God is forever gone. But the God that represents man’s highest hopes and aspirations remains very much alive.

What Nietzsche’s Zarathustra fears most is that creator-man will die along with his creator-God, leaving nothing but “the last man” who has transformed himself into a mere component of an orderly industrial machine. The last man “makes all things small,” including himself. He no longer aspires to create something great, but only to play his tiny part in the machine. The last man enjoys his entertainment, but he wants to make sure it too remains small and superficial. “He's careful that his entertainment never takes hold of him.”

When duty makes man small, as it does in an industrial society that asks him to become a gear in a vast machine, man must cast a “holy no” in the face of duty. Creating freedom is the first step of all creativity. In the past man put “thou shalt” in his holiest place. “Now he must find frenzy and willfulness in his holiest place.” Creativity demands saying no to the duty that makes man small, and then “a new beginning, a first movement, a holy yes-saying.”

“If you can’t be the holy men of insight, at least be its warriors, the vehicles and harbingers of its holiness.” Nietzsche envisions a new religion where all the piety and reverence we had once directed to the unknown God is directed to a God of insight. He wants us to retain all the evangelical fervor we have lavished on the gospel, but now directed toward a new gospel of creative searching.

What is most praiseworthy is what is most difficult. The next step on the path to greatness is the one that leads uphill. You will invariably seem eccentric. No one will understand your path except the friend willing to walk beside you.

“To value is to create.” The last man no longer creates. So he can no longer value. What his neighbor seems to value, the last man avidly adopts as his own value. But his neighbor doesn’t create either. The carcasses of dead values circulate in place of living ones. And the stench is overwhelming.

“You must want to burn up in your own flame. How will you become new if you haven't first turned to ashes?” Nietzsche, like Jesus, wants his disciples to die to the world and be born again. Baptism of fire prepares us for a new life of courageous creativity.

This is the Thomas Common translation of the text. I was redirected here from the much more widely acclaimed Parkes translation. I don't know if this was a mistake or deliberate subterfuge. But FYI, here is what Wikipedia has to say about the various translations available (this entry accords with common scholarly opinion on the translations):

English translations of Zarathustra differ according to the sentiments of each translators. The Thomas Common translation favors a classic English approach, in the style of Shakespeare or the King James Version of the Bible. Common's poetic interpretation of the text, which renders the title Thus Spake Zarathustra, received wide acclaim for its lambent portrayal. Common reasoned that because the original German was written in a pseudo-Luther-Biblical style, a pseudo-King-James-Biblical style would be fitting in the English translation.

The Common translation, which improved on Alexander Tille's earlier attempt,[10] remained widely accepted until the more critical translations, titled Thus Spoke Zarathustra, separately by R.J. Hollingdale and Walter Kaufmann, which are considered to convey more accurately the German text than the Common version. Kaufmann's introduction to his own translation included a blistering critique of Common's version; he notes that in one instance, Common has taken the German "most evil" and rendered it "baddest", a particularly unfortunate error not merely for his having coined the term "baddest", but also because Nietzsche dedicated a third of The Genealogy of Morals to the difference between "bad" and "evil".[10] This and other errors led Kaufmann to wonder whether Common "had little German and less English".[10] The translations of Kaufmann and Hollingdale render the text in a far more familiar, less archaic, style of language, than that of Common.

Clancy Martin's 2005 translation opens with criticism and praise for these three seminal translators, Common, Hollingdale, and Kaufmann. He notes that the German text available to Common was considerably flawed, and that the German text from which Hollingdale and Kaufmann worked was itself untrue to Nietzsche's own work in some ways. Martin criticizes Kaufmann for changing punctuation, altering literal and philosophical meanings, and dampening some of Nietzsche's more controversial metaphors.[11] Kaufmann's version, which has become the most widely available, features a translator's note suggesting that Nietzsche's text would have benefited from an editor; Martin suggests that Kaufmann "took it upon himself to become his [Nietzsche's] editor".[11]

Graham Parkes describes his own 2005 translation as trying "above all to convey the musicality of the text (which was not a priority for Walter Kaufmann or R.J. Hollingdale, authors of the best English translations so far)."[12]

Nietzsche is above all a psychological thinker at his most profound. Sometimes, he extends his psychology into political theory, sometimes in a way that seems to give psychological insight to political movements. More often than not, his psychology cannot be generalized into political statements, although Nietzsche wants to do this.

In his book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he is at his best since he is a psychologist rather than a social critic. (Where he dabbles too much into issues of politics and gender, he is inclined to err.)

Nietzsche's Zarathustra is a prophet for a secular era. It's very interesting how much the ideas in the book parallel those later discovered by Wilfred Bion, especially in terms of the psychology of group dynamics. Nietzsche had insights into the ways that groups unconsciously coordinate their members to reinforce conformity and compliance. There is no place for a self-reliant individual where there is a "herd". Creativity is even less respected by the "herd", because it disrupts the unconscious mechanisms of herd organisation. Without needing to have any intellectual grasp of a reality outside of the herd, those who partake of group dynamics are still capable of annihilating anyone who thinks and acts differently from the group. The attacks by the herd against the one who stands alone and the counter-struggle for survival have psychological origins at a subliminal level.

Nietzsche makes visible these otherwise hidden phenomena: he shows that generally those who stand alone are destroyed, that nobody has to say anything for these attacks to begin to occur. They happen automatically without overt provocation. It's group psychological dynamics at work.

Nietzsche's solution to those who are are likely to be attacked for their qualities of independence is that they should prepare for this to happen. They should also throw all their weight into the creative side of their characters, and forget about conforming. If you have intellectual qualities, or creative qualities that distinguish you from the herd (not in your own mind, but in theirs), you may as well invest in these totally, even if it means willing your own destruction -- because the greater your ability, the more likely you are to cause disquiet in those who have chosen to relinquish their independence for the sake of being protected by the group.

… it does feel SO good when you stop.

Way, actually, way, way back in college, I tucked away in a neuron or two that a couple of the much smarter students were reading this work, with the somewhat authoritative title, with an implication that greater wisdom might be found in Asia, of all places. ‘Lo these many years later, and I still had not read any Friedrich Nietzsche, when this work leaped out at me from the bookshelf of a bookstore in nearby Santa Fe. I asked a former fellow the store reviewer what he thought of this work. He admitted he had never read it; his enthusiasm for the work seemed somewhat muted, and he remarked: It’s one of those books that there is something for everyone in it. The best part to me were the words: “The End.” This book was the ultimate test of my “principle” to always finish a book once I commence reading it.

Nietzsche was born in 1844 and died at the age of 55 in 1900. Generally, he is considered German, but may have been of Polish extraction. For proclaiming a life of action and heroics, he was mainly an academic, one of the youngest tenured professors ever, at the age of 24 in Basel. Towards the end of his life he was hospitalized for mental breakdowns that may have been the result of tertiary syphilis. In addition, his marriage proposals to the love of his life, Lou Salomé, were thrice rejected. His father was a Lutheran pastor. He would reject Christianity, proclaimed that “God is Dead,” and decide to reinterpret the Zoroastrian religion of Persia in positing the objective of life was to move from the status of “man” to “superman.”

This work was translated from the German by R. J. Hollingdale, who also wrote the introduction. Hollingdale provided the following quote in the introduction which he says is Nietzsche’ most famous, which is NOT from this work, but from The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, a portion of which is as follows:

“I greet all the signs that a more manly, warlike age is coming, which will, above all, bring valour again into honour…that age which will carry heroism into knowledge and wage war for the sake of ideas and their consequences.”

"For believe me! — the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer! At long last the search for knowledge will reach out for its due: — it will want to rule and possess, and you with it!"

Ugh! That might about say it all, except that it does not. Salomé’s rejections, and the syphilis provided the basis for a strong streak of misogyny, of the “men are heroic warriors and the women are barefoot and pregnant” variety. Consider: “Is it not better to fall into the hands of a murderer than into the dreams of a lustful woman?” “In woman, a slave and a tyrant have all too long been concealed. For that reason, woman is not yet capable of friendship; she knows only love… women are still cats and birds. Or, at best, cows.” “…and everything about woman has one solution: it is called pregnancy.”

I found the “Ughs” relentless, along with the elitism espoused by his “superman” pursuit. Virtually every page I marked with a sentence that could be included in this review: “moderation is mediocrity,” “virtue is cowardice” and the heated rhetoric of: “more offensive to me, however, are all lickspittles, and the most offensive beast of a man I ever found I baptized Parasite.”

Only one book have I literally thrown in the trash: William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. (Admittedly I retrieved it, and finished it; see the above mentioned “principle.”) Burroughs work had significant passages of drug-induced rambles; so too with Nietzsche, and those rambles, including a snake down the throat of a shepherd, which the prophet Zarathustra advices to bite off, may have been induced by the syphilis as well as the opium.

So, Nietzsche leaves one religious system only to attempt to create another, with prophets, disciples, and, the dreaded “apostates.” Well, enough. Time to lay down my hammer and read a good book on travel, of the less dangerous variety. For the only book of Nietzsche I will ever read: 1-star.

Nietzsche's fictional story of the completive and introspective Zarathustra is a fascinating read that exposes the reader to the idea of how we conceive God and our place in the world, which for Nietzsche's Zarathustra there exists known to be observed amongst the masses of people. The Ubermensch concept is described in Nietzsche's own writing here and he makes the case that man should overcome and evolve forward from what he perceives to be the limiting aspect of religion and God for people in society. While the nihilism theme is apparent in the book, Nietzsche's Zarathustra appears compelled to overcome even that nihilism to kind of "engineer" if you will a new value or belief system to replace modern religion and in particular Christianity.

The introduction explains how mistaken people are for likening it to Nazism. After not too many or too few on the subject, I have to say that this has got to be by far the best among them proof that Nazis were anti Christian.

Just wow. Anti Jewish, ant Christian, anti Bible. The author is clearly familiar with the Bible as this title is a deranged repudiation of, I think, all of its values and so forth. While promoting this superhuman not yet existent. It's almost as if he went through the Bible with a fine too comb and tried his best to say or promote the exact opposite, getting confused in spots what the opposite would be.

I would have chosen to keep it since it would make an invaluable reference, but by the half way point became bored with if not repelled by the negativity. However, I highly recommend this book for all intelligent adults to get hold of and read... If you, or anyone you know, is researching politics to any degree, this is an absolute must read. Buy it, advise it to friends.

In my opinion the book entitled ''Thus spoke Zarathustra'' is the best choice for beginners who want to know the unique philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. After reading this remarkable book one can continue the exploitation of his writings.

Nietzsche's writings for me... Within his writings I find real joy of being a man. I really like to read something what gives the power to the reader. It gives to the reader the power and also a sort of consolation. I personally like his brilliant ideas, which are expressed openly and in not so many words. For instance, the quotation of him: ''Your will and your foot which has a will to go over and beyond yourselves — that shall constitute your new honor.'' - This sentence is great and at the same time very true.

Some people who read his writings tend to see them as a work of a poet. But I do not see Nietzsche as poet. But one is right saying that his writing are uniquely expressive. One can ask if all of his ideas are true. One should keep in mind one Nietzsche's quotation. He stated once that ''there are no facts, there are only interpretations''.

Is his philosophy dangerous? In my opinion opinion his philosophy is dangerous only for people who want to have peaceful dreams in their life.

One thing is beyond any doubts. If one wants to have own opinion on Nietzsche's writings one should definitely read them. One should not only rely on opinions of other people.