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allegorical dream image, under the influence
of the Apollonian dream. That reflection of
original suffering in music, devoid of image
and concept, with its redemption in
appearance, now produces a second mirror
image, as a single allegory or example. 14
I am beginning to see that I may have misread the
phrase in Kaufman’s translation, “repetition and recast
of the world,” which very nearly recurs here. Perhaps
there is a difference that I did not fully appreciate
between “copy” and “repetition.” I think I now see
how to recover from the aporia in which I involved
myself.
Let us look at Schopenhauer, whom Nietzsche is
drawing upon heavily here. Schopenhauer says,
As our world is nothing but the phenomenon
or appearance of the Ideas in plurality
through entrance into the principium
individuationis…, music, since it passes
over Ideas, is also quite independent of the
phenomenal world, positively ignores it,
and, to a certain extent, could still exist even
if there were no world at all, which cannot
be said of the other arts. Thus music is as
immediate an objectification and copy of the
whole will, as the world itself is, as indeed
as the Ideas are, the multiplied phenomenon
of which constitutes the world of individual
things. Therefore music is by no means like
the other arts, namely a copy of the ideas,
but a copy of the will itself, the objectivity
of which are the ideas. For this reason the
effect of music is so very much more
powerful and penetrating than is that of the
other arts, for these others speak only of the
shadow, but music of the essence. 15
We see that for Schopenhauer, music is a copy of
the primal will, and as such, is on an equal par with
the world itself, which is also a copy of the primal
will. Music, then, could even be called an original
recasting, in the sense of recreating, of the world. So,
in Nietzsche’s passage, music copies the primal will,
which is a parallel, or repetition, but not a copy, of the
world, and it then produces Apollonian images as a
dreamlike second copy of itself. Now I see that
Kaufman’s version is right after all, with the proviso
that one understands “repetition” in its philosophical
meaning, which goes back at least as far as
Kierkegaard, as a new and parallel instance, not as an
ordinary language synonym of copy. Hence, Speirs
actually goes wrong when he calls music a “repetition
of the world and a second copy of it.” He has fallen
prey to the very misreading that I mistakenly thought I
saw in Kaufman. Smith is very close to correct, except
that “cast” may mislead more than “recast,” which is
closer to the German (ein zweiter Abguss). What
needs to be avoided in this passage, above all, is the
idea that one is making a cast from the world instead
of freshly recasting an equivalent to the world, or, to
put it differently, one is making a new world in a
parallel creation through music.
The wavering and meandering struggle I
presented in clarifying this passage is a dramatization
of the difficulties of interpretation and translation of a
complex work and the corresponding advantage of
having multiple translations available to consult. Such
difficulties are best viewed as creative opportunities,
not as dismaying glitches that need to be bridged over
with casual approximations, such as Golfing
sometimes seems to do. A translation should recreate
within the new context of a target language — with its
differing phrasing, its vocabulary entwined with
alternate traditions, its varying rhetorical devices — as
much of the coherence, stylistic integrity, and
meaning of the original text as possible. As we have
seen, glitches in meaning, ambiguities in phrasing,
and disagreements among translations are the best
symptoms of the troublesome passages to which we
should pay the most attention. In the passage we
examined, Kaufman, with the use of the word
“repetition,” is technically correct. But is a passage
that a reader can easily misread adequately translated
Since translation of a culturally rich linguistic
production is, and will always remain, an art form,
there is no precisely correct answer.
As a translator of this passage, would I alter the
wording in English to render more clearly the density
of assumptions Nietzsche is making Or would I risk
the intrusion of a footnote to clarify the usage of a
philosophical word I might try rewording the phrase:
…produced the likeness of this primal unity
as music, if this has rightly been called by
others a recurrence and fresh instance of the
world…
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