Nietzsche’s “Thus spoke Zarathustra”(German: Also Sprach Zarathustra, 1883-1885).
Mejame Ejede Charley
Nietzsche’s masterpiece, by the power and lyrical beauty in which he translates the
sentiment he had for love, is his poem in prose:Thus spoke Zarathustra.In this magnus opus there are no historical theories or an abstract system; it is from a direct sentiment that everything nearly proceeds and everything nearly addresses itself to sentiment. Nietzsche composed his work in a solitude, in the middle of mountains, at the sea shore, in mid day countries, from 1883 to 1885, during the years in which he seemed to have regained his health. As Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Hugo, Shelley, Byron etc., he was alone in the presence of nature.It is in the wake of leaving his country(Germany) and his friends, that he truly found himself and attained high poetic exaltation.Again as to Shelley, Keats, and Browning, he needed a mid day in order to demonstrate and, to open out the powers of his imagination and of his sensibility. His book is divided into four parts, comprising of Zarathustra’s speeches to his disciples, exhortations, maxims, and meditations of the
prophet or hymns in a solitude.
Zarathustra is the idealised image of the author almost as Faust is to Goethe. Creative daze was such to Nietzsche, taking him only ten days in writing each of the first parts of his work.It to for a model the poetic form of the Bible. Everywhere in his book we feel in him a musician or a lyrical poet.; every piece, as a musical or lyrical piece, as an Ode or as an elegy, as an andante or as an allegro, differing from the nuance it translates and conveys.
The first part of Zarathustra embraces speeches of the prophet to his disciples, teaching them his doctrine and ridicules his opponents.The general ton is rather calm.
In the second part, there is a mixture of speeches and of solitary meditations, the dominant tone is that of exalted lyricism, now and then enthusiastic, sometimes satirical; the ideal of superhuman defines itself more and more distinctly.
The third part, entirely composed of hymns or mediations of Zarathustra in solitude, on the sea or in the mountains, the prophet’s imagination is possessed by the idea of the eternal recurrence, and lyrical, joyous, or melancholic exaltation, becomes extraordinary.
The fourth part, in the final analysis, relates the meeting of Zarathustra with ‘super human beings’, his most noble types, who, be that as it may are disheartened and ridiculous, and to whom the prophet teaches the superman and eternal recurrence; the lyrical impulse is less continued than in the precedent parts. The first joy of poetic conception seem to have diminished, the dominant tone becomes one of buffoonery.
A last part, in which there remain only projects, would have shown us the death of the blessing Zarathustra,life before leaving it,for all that it has of greatness and beauty.
By style, Thus spoke Zarathustra, is not only Nietzsche’s masterpience, it is that of the German word.His study of the French prose writer have taught him, as to Goethe, Heine and Schopenhauer, to write short sentences and thus avoid the difficulties presented by the German syntax, rules of which risk making something shapeless and inorganic; it is largely, in part, the habit of writing in aphorisms that he owes the perfection of his style; nothing shows this than a comparison of his previous writings in 1876 with those he composed later;even after 1876, he remains often rather left when he adventures in a sentence of a complex structure.
The poet and the musician in him, is revealed in his choice of words, in their melodic beauty and in their embodying power, in their succession of rythms and in the admirable correspondence of these rythms, melodies and the sentiments they convey. While knowing how to escape the dangers of the German language, Nietzsche knows how to use all the resources peculiar to him, creating new words as well as compound words, transforming verbs to substantives, in way to express actions where the French language has only words representing states, passing by undefinable nuances all range of meanings of one and the same word, which now and again indicates the same idea, occasionally an imagery, sentiment from time to time; words in some languages, such as the French language, do not have this plasticity; it is thereabouts that Nietzsche’s consummate art it impossible for any faithful translation in order languages their Zarathustra.
Nietzsche resembles Shelley, exceptionally the Shelley of Prometheus unbound; the impression that his hymns leave is that of the daze of joy, that of a dance in the light.He loves a virgin and solitary nature overmuch and all that gives him the feeling of power and expansion: large open space, in mid day, on the free sea or in mountains, the radiance of universal transparency.