The Portable Nietzsche Read Free

meaning and mood are inseparable. If the translator makes things easy for himself and omits a play on words, he unwittingly makes a lighthearted pun or rhyme look serious, if he does not reduce the whole passage to nonsense. And he abets the common misconception of the austere Nietzsche, when, in fact, no other philosopher knew better how to laugh at himself.
    Those who browse in this volume will find a conglomeration where anyone reading it straight through will likely find one of the most fascinating men of all time: a man as multi-dimensional as his style, profound and then again piteous, as tragic as he is widely supposed to have been, but no less comic—almost as different from his popular caricatures as a character in Shakespeare, or more likely in Dostoevski, is from the comic strip version of Superman. In his own formula: Ecce homo!

III
    Nietzsche was born in 1844; lost his father, a Lutheran minister, in 1849; spent his childhood surrounded by his mother, sister, grandmother, and two maiden aunts; was sent to a first-rate boarding school, Schulpforta; and proceeded to the universities of Bonn and Leipzig to study classical philology. Our knowledge of his youth rests largely on his sister’s later hagiographies, but the twenty-four-year-old comes to life for us in the recommendation that earned him a professorship at Basel. The writer was Friedrich Ritschl, a generally conservative professor at Leipzig.
    â€œHowever many young talents I have seen develop under my eyes for thirty-nine years now, never yet have I known a young man, or tried to help one along in my field as best I could, who was so mature as early and as young as this Nietzsche. His Museum articles he wrote in the second and third year of his triennium. He is the first from whom I have ever accepted any contribution at all while he was still a student. If—God grant—he lives long enough, I prophesy that he will one day stand in the front rank of German philology. He is now twenty-four years old: strong, vigorous, healthy, courageous physically and morally, so constituted as to impress those of a similar nature. On top of that, he possesses the enviable gift of presenting ideas, talking freely, as calmly as he speaks skillfully and clearly. He is the idol and, without wishing it, the leader of the whole younger generation of philologists here in Leipzig who—and they are rather numerous—cannot wait to hear him as a lecturer. You will say, I describe a phenomenon. Well, that is just what he is—and at the same time pleasant and modest. Also a gifted musician, which is irrelevant here.”
    But Nietzsche had not yet fulfilled his residence requirement and hence had no doctorate. So Ritschl expected the case to be hopeless, “although in the present instance,” he wrote, “I should stake my whole philological and academic reputation that the matter would work out happily.” It is hardly surprising that Basel decided to ignore the “formal insufficiency.” Ritschl was delighted: “In Germany , that sort of thing happens absolutely never.” And he felt he should further describe his protégé.
    â€œNietzsche is not at all a specifically political nature. He may have in general, on the whole, some sympathy for the growing greatness of Germany, but, like myself, no special tendre for Prussianism; yet he has vivid feeling for free civic and spiritual development, and thus certainly a heart for your Swiss institutions and way of living. What more am I to say? His studies so far have been weighted toward the history of Greek literature (of course, including critical and exegetical treatment of the authors), with special emphasis, it seems to me, on the history of Greek philosophy. But I have not the least doubt that, if confronted by a practical demand, with his great gifts he will work in other fields with the best of success. He will simply be able to do anything he wants to