(no subject)
THE SCENE: College. America. You read some Nietzsche. Your mind is blown! Then, if you are Nathan Leopold or Richard Loeb, you go and kill somebody. If you are enforcing the Hays Code in Hollywood, you cut a scene showing "Will to Power" from a Barbara Stanwyck movie. If you are what people call an "asshole," you memorize some passages and spout them at people. You also carefully remember how to spell the name Friedrich Nietzsche.
But this is America. Nietzsche was born in Prussia, taught in Switzerland, and was inspired in Italy -- how can we in the U.S. be sure we know anything at all about the man? According to American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas, by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, Americans have been given at least three versions of Nietzsche. The man himself loved Ralph Waldo Emerson, a once-towering but now almost obscure figure. That would have made him a square if the twenties bohos knew about that, but instead they used Nietzsche to justify their belief that America was for squares and Europe was intellectually superior.
However, over in Europe, some people were using Nietzsche to fight not one but two World Wars. Not cool, man! His reputation fell. He needed a makeover. Enter Walter Kaufmann.
Kaufmann's translations were Nietzsche to most of America. He made sure to highlight any passages showing Nietzsche "hated anti-Semites and German nationalists as well as woolly-headed romantics." That's not a terrible move, but it's a corrective one, and distorts our American lens's image. We want the complete Nietzsche, from the tips of his boots to the crazy wave of hair on his head! (And definitely including the moustache.) Will we ever get a true picture of him, here in culturally forlorn America? Or is it just too late? Translating 19th-century German into 21st-century English is a fool's errand -- even Kaufmann's later translations of the same passages lost some essential flavor. I don't know, but I will close with the epigraph to The Gay Science, where we see that even Nietzsche loves to quote Nietzsche:
I live in my own place,
have never copied nobody even half,
and at any master who lacks the grace
to laugh at himself--I laugh.
OVER THE DOOR TO MY HOUSE
But this is America. Nietzsche was born in Prussia, taught in Switzerland, and was inspired in Italy -- how can we in the U.S. be sure we know anything at all about the man? According to American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas, by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, Americans have been given at least three versions of Nietzsche. The man himself loved Ralph Waldo Emerson, a once-towering but now almost obscure figure. That would have made him a square if the twenties bohos knew about that, but instead they used Nietzsche to justify their belief that America was for squares and Europe was intellectually superior.
However, over in Europe, some people were using Nietzsche to fight not one but two World Wars. Not cool, man! His reputation fell. He needed a makeover. Enter Walter Kaufmann.
Kaufmann's translations were Nietzsche to most of America. He made sure to highlight any passages showing Nietzsche "hated anti-Semites and German nationalists as well as woolly-headed romantics." That's not a terrible move, but it's a corrective one, and distorts our American lens's image. We want the complete Nietzsche, from the tips of his boots to the crazy wave of hair on his head! (And definitely including the moustache.) Will we ever get a true picture of him, here in culturally forlorn America? Or is it just too late? Translating 19th-century German into 21st-century English is a fool's errand -- even Kaufmann's later translations of the same passages lost some essential flavor. I don't know, but I will close with the epigraph to The Gay Science, where we see that even Nietzsche loves to quote Nietzsche:
I live in my own place,
have never copied nobody even half,
and at any master who lacks the grace
to laugh at himself--I laugh.
OVER THE DOOR TO MY HOUSE