Thus Spoke Zarathustra

What It Is

Four parts, written between 1883 and 1885, in bursts Nietzsche claimed took ten days each. It is not philosophy in any ordinary sense. There are no arguments, no premises, no chapters of analysis. There are speeches, parables, songs and denunciations, delivered by a prophet with a name borrowed from ancient Persia, in prose that deliberately parodies Luther's Bible.

He could not find a publisher for the fourth part, and had about forty copies printed privately for friends.

This is where the ideas Nietzsche argued for elsewhere return as vision, song and prophecy, and where his hardest demands on a reader are made rather than defended. Expect exhilaration and expect tedium, sometimes on the same page.

Why It Matters

It changed what a philosopher was permitted to sound like. Before it, philosophy argued. Nietzsche sang, mocked, prophesied and told stories, and the effect on the century that followed was enormous: Heidegger, Jung, Rilke, Yeats, Shaw, Malraux, Strauss's tone poem, Mahler's Third Symphony. German soldiers carried it in their packs into the First World War.

The core of it is a demand rather than a doctrine, and the demand arrives as a question. That question is designed to be unanswerable in the abstract and answerable only by how you live. It is the hardest thing in Nietzsche and the reason people keep coming back.

Now the honest part. This is a book that flatters the reader who wants to feel exceptional, and it has been picked up by a great many people who should have put it down. His sister Elisabeth, an antisemite who later welcomed the Nazi state, took control of his papers after his collapse and did as she pleased with them. Nietzsche himself broke with Wagner over antisemitism and despised German nationalism, but the misuse was made easy by the writing. A book of oracles can be quoted in support of anything.

Before You Read

Around 300 pages, eight to ten hours, and it should be slow. Read a few sections a night. Read it straight through and it will turn to noise.

Here is the advice nobody gives and everybody needs: this is the worst place to start Nietzsche, and it is where almost everyone starts. Read Beyond Good and Evil or On the Genealogy of Morality first. Those books argue, and once you know what Nietzsche is arguing for, Zarathustra stops being a fog of aphorisms and becomes the same thought at a higher temperature.

Which Translation to Read

• Walter Kaufmann (Viking, and in The Portable Nietzsche) — recommended. The version that made Nietzsche respectable in English and rescued him from his sister's admirers. Kaufmann catches the puns, the biblical parody and the jokes, which most translators lose, and his notes explain what is being mocked in a line you would otherwise read straight. The cost: he repunctuates freely, and the rhythm you are reading is often his. His commentary also fights a battle, against the Nazi appropriation, that has long since been won, and it can feel like being lectured. View on Amazon →
• Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, 2006). The scholarly standard now, restoring Nietzsche's own punctuation and versification, with an editorial apparatus by Robert Pippin. Take it if you intend to argue about the German. The cost: more faithful than alive. It is a study text and reads like one.
• Graham Parkes (Oxford World's Classics, 2005). The best-sounding English Zarathustra, made by a translator openly chasing the musicality of the original, and the one to read aloud. The cost: to keep the music he takes liberties, and some of the beauty on the page is his.

Take Kaufmann first, for the notes and the wit. Del Caro if you want the text as Nietzsche pointed it, Parkes if you want to hear it. R. J. Hollingdale's Penguin version is the one generations read and remains sound, though its archaism now feels like costume.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read it aloud. It was written for the ear, and the sections that seem inflated on the page often turn out to be funny in the mouth.

Read Kaufmann's footnotes. Half of Zarathustra is parody, and without them you will miss the target.

Keep a page for the images and animals that keep returning; you will need it. They are the closest thing this book has to an argument.

And read it against yourself. Nietzsche is not writing for disciples and says so, repeatedly, to a reader who is not listening.