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We will have achieved much for the
discipline of aesthetics when we have
arrived not only at the logical insight but the
direct intuition that the continued
development of art is linked to the
Apollonian and Dionysian duality — just as
procreation depends on duality of the sexes,
which are engaged in continual struggle
interrupted only by temporary periods of
reconciliation.
This is one word longer than Kaufman’s English
and Nietzsche’s German, but it combines clarity with
accuracy while still paring away excess. But word
count is a low-level criterion and should be used only
to combat wordiness. Apart from my own version, I
vote Smith’s rendering of this sentence as the best.
Speirs appears not to realize how lapidary is
Nietzsche’s style.
Finding the best translation out of many, however,
is not always the proper task. Sometimes we should be
glad for the multiplicity of available translations. If we
jump ahead to the opening sentence of section 5, we
shall find a variety of choices. Golfing has “We are
now approaching the central concern of our inquiry.”
Kaufman has, “We now approach the real goal of our
investigation.” Speirs and Smith have, respectively,
“We are now drawing closer to the true goal of our
study,” and “We are now approaching the real goal of
our inquiry.” Since Nietzsche says, “Wir nahen uns
jetzt dem eigentlichen Ziele unsrer Untersuchung,” I
have no real complaint with any of these, although I
might worry a little about Speir’s use of “true goal,”
given Nietzsche’s extensive meditations on “truth,”
and, for that matter, “goal” seems too final for an
examination or search that is ongoing. But it is not
until a few lines further on that alarm bells start really
going off.
Golfing writes:
Homer, the hoary dreamer, caught in utter
abstraction, prototype of the Apollonian
naïve artist, stares in amazement at the
passionate head of Archilochus, soldierly
servant of the Muses, knocked about by
fortune.
Although “hoary” is not yet obsolete in English, I
wonder how many post-Freudian readers consider, at
least subliminally and briefly, whether sexual
fantasies are suggested by: “Homer, the hoary
dreamer” The translator seems willing to risk a
vagueness of meaning for the thrill of alliteration. But
“caught in utter abstraction” Who could experience
the palpable, sensual, pre-Socratic world of Homer
and say, or think that Nietzsche would say, that
Homer was likely to be caught in utter abstraction
Here is what Nietzsche wrote in German:
Homer, der in sich versunkene greise
Träumer, der Typus des Apollonischen,
naiven Künstlers, sieht nun staunend den
leidschaftlichen Kopf des wild durchs
Dasein getriebenen kriegerischen
Musendieners Archilochus….
Where is Homer’s “caught in utter abstraction”
Apparently, Golfing thought Nietzsche needed help
and supplied a gloss, but what thinker could survive
such help And where is the soldier knocked about by
fortune For this phrase Kaufman says, “beholds with
astonishment the passionate head of the warlike votary
of the muses, Archilochus, who was hunted savagely
through life.” This is closer to the German and still
lyrical in English. Golfing seems to have accepted the
first cliché that came to mind: “soldier of fortune.”
But a soldier of fortune seeks adventure; he is not
driven wildly through existence. Kaufman is more
careful to follow the German. The other two
translators are close enough to Kaufman and need not
to be quoted here.
It seems clear to us today that to translate a
philosopher requires knowledge of the philosophical
concepts and themes of a particular historical moment.
Translation of references to vital themes requires
judgment and cannot always be tied mechanically to
specific words. For instance, Kant, in the first
Critique, uses Schein to mean illusion and
Erscheinung to mean appearance, 7 but Nietzsche, in
the context of The Birth of Tragedy uses Schein to
mean appearance. 8 Two of the translators agree with
me; Golfing and Speirs do not. Here is Golfing’s
version of one of the key paragraphs in the book, in
which Nietzsche describes the ancient merger of poet
and musician, a passage crucial to understanding
tragedy as Nietzsche sees it:
He is, first and foremost, a Dionysian artist,
become wholly identified with the original
Oneness, its pain and contradiction, and
producing a replica of that Oneness as
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