The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs Review
After years of avoiding Nietzsche, I recently tried reading him again, inspired by Hollingdale's biography "Nietzsche: The Man and his Philosophy." Looking for one of Nietzsche's works that would give me a better general understanding of his philosophy and outlook on life, I turned to "The Gay Science" -- and was immersed in a world of explorations (of knowledge, truth, and morality), inspiring challenges ("Live dangerously!"), infamous declarations ("God is dead"), and a constellation of poems -- one of which, "Star Morals," could summarize Nietzsche's entire philosophy: "Called a star's orbit to pursue, / What is the darkness, star, to you? / Roll on in bliss, traverse this age - / Its misery far from you and strange. / Let farthest world your light secure. / Pity is sin you must abjure. / But one command is yours: Be Pure!"
Impressive poet, intriguing psychologist, intimidating philosopher: Nietzsche is also a superb writer; and although I've never read Nietzsche in the original German, this translation by Walter Kaufmann, the foremost translator of Nietzsche, is excellent. However, Kaufmann's notes sometimes seem less than helpful in elucidating the text, seem to focus mainly on mechanical matters of translation, and contain numerous references to his own works -- which strikes me as slightly pompous. But I'm neither a Nietzsche scholar nor an expert on translation, and these are merely a lay-reader's observations.
In his introduction, Kaufmann notes that "The Gay Science" is "a microcosm in which we find almost all of Nietzsche" - Nietzsche as poet, as psychologist, and as philosopher. Because Nietzsche's writing is so vibrant and his thoughts and ideas so compelling and complex, "The Gay Science" is worth reading, and re-reading, and reading again - for a single reading doesn't begin to do Nietzsche justice.
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The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs Overview
Nietzsche called The Gay Science "the most personal of all my books." It was here that he first proclaimed the death of God -- to which a large part of the book is devoted -- and his doctrine of the eternal recurrence.
Walter Kaufmann's commentary, with its many quotations from previously untranslated letters, brings to life Nietzsche as a human being and illuminates his philosophy. The book contains some of Nietzsche's most sustained discussions of art and morality, knowledge and truth, the intellectual conscience and the origin of logic.
Most of the book was written just before Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the last part five years later, after Beyond Good and Evil. We encounter Zarathustra in these pages as well as many of Nietzsche's most interesting philosophical ideas and the largest collection of his own poetry that he himself ever published.
Walter Kaufmann's English versions of Nietzsche represent one of the major translation enterprises of our time. He is the first philosopher to have translated Nietzsche's major works, and never before has a single translator given us so much of Nietzsche.
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