Beyond Good and Evil Friedrich Nietzsche (the little red hen read aloud .txt) 📖

hearken attentively and diligently; he ought, in general, to have an open ear wherever there is talk without indignation. For the indignant man, and he who perpetually tears and lacerates himself with his own teeth (or, in place of himself, the world, God, or society), may indeed, morally speaking, stand higher than the laughing and self-satisfied satyr, but in every other sense he is the more ordinary, more indifferent, and less instructive case. And no one is such a liar as the indignant man. 27

It is difficult to be understood, especially when one thinks and lives gangasrotogati1 among those only who think and live otherwise⁠—namely, kurmagati,2 or at best “froglike,” mandeikagati3 (I do everything to be “difficultly understood” myself!)⁠—and one should be heartily grateful for the good will to some refinement of interpretation. As regards “the good friends,” however, who are always too easygoing, and think that as friends they have a right to ease, one does well at the very first to grant them a playground and romping-place for misunderstanding⁠—one can thus laugh still; or get rid of them altogether, these good friends⁠—and laugh then also!

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What is most difficult to render from one language into another is the tempo of its style, which has its basis in the character of the race, or to speak more physiologically, in the average tempo of the assimilation of its nutriment. There are honestly meant translations, which, as involuntary vulgarizations, are almost falsifications of the original, merely because its lively and merry tempo (which overleaps and obviates all dangers in word and expression) could not also be rendered. A German is almost incapacitated for presto in his language; consequently also, as may be reasonably inferred, for many of the most delightful and daring nuances of free, free-spirited thought. And just as the buffoon and satyr are foreign to him in body and conscience, so Aristophanes and Petronius are untranslatable for him. Everything ponderous, viscous, and pompously clumsy, all long-winded and wearying species of style, are developed in profuse variety among Germans⁠—pardon me for stating the fact that even Goethe’s prose, in its mixture of stiffness and elegance, is no exception, as a reflection of the “good old time” to which it belongs, and as an expression of German taste at a time when there was still a “German taste,” which was a rococo-taste in moribus et artibus. Lessing is an exception, owing to his histrionic nature, which understood much, and was versed in many things; he who was not the translator of Bayle to no purpose, who took refuge willingly in the shadow of Diderot and Voltaire, and still more willingly among the Roman comedy-writers⁠—Lessing loved also free-spiritism in the tempo, and flight out of Germany. But how could the German language, even in the prose of Lessing, imitate the tempo of Machiavelli, who in his Principe makes us breathe the dry, fine air of Florence, and cannot help presenting the most serious events in a boisterous allegrissimo, perhaps not without a malicious artistic sense of the contrast he ventures to present⁠—long, heavy, difficult, dangerous thoughts, and a tempo of the gallop, and of the best, wantonest humour? Finally, who would venture on a German translation of Petronius, who, more than any great musician hitherto, was a master of presto in invention, ideas, and words? What matter in the end about the swamps of the sick, evil world, or of the “ancient world,” when like him, one has the feet of a wind, the rush, the breath, the emancipating scorn of a wind, which makes everything healthy, by making everything run! And with regard to Aristophanes⁠—that transfiguring, complementary genius, for whose sake one pardons all Hellenism for having existed, provided one has understood in its full profundity all that there requires pardon and transfiguration; there is nothing that has caused me to meditate more on Plato’s secrecy and sphinxlike nature, than the happily preserved petit fait that under the pillow of his deathbed there was found no Bible, nor anything Egyptian, Pythagorean, or Platonic⁠—but a book of Aristophanes. How could even Plato have endured life⁠—a Greek life which he repudiated⁠—without an Aristophanes!

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It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it, even with the best right, but without being obliged to do so, proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring beyond measure. He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which life in itself already brings with it; not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes isolated, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience. Supposing such a one comes to grief, it is so far from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it, nor sympathize with it. And he cannot any longer go back! He cannot even go back again to the sympathy of men!

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Our deepest insights must⁠—and should⁠—appear as follies, and under certain circumstances as crimes, when they come unauthorizedly to the ears of those who are not disposed and predestined for them. The exoteric and the esoteric, as they were formerly distinguished by philosophers⁠—among the Indians, as among the Greeks, Persians, and Mussulmans, in short, wherever people believed in gradations of rank and not in equality and equal rights⁠—are not so much in contradistinction to one another in respect to the exoteric class, standing without, and viewing, estimating, measuring, and judging from the outside, and not from the inside; the more essential distinction is that the class in question views things from below upwards⁠—while the esoteric class views things from above downwards. There are heights of the soul from which tragedy itself no longer appears to operate tragically; and if all the woe in