Steve Calihan wrote:
>
> > What of the use of irony,
> > here, as a deliberate device designed to disrupt, undercut, disorder the
> > otherwise all-too-ponderous tendency of the German tongue to reduce all
> > thought down to an ordered categorization (Kant) or simply to introduce a
> > counter-tempo, a rhythm running against the grain? (Must we not only "read,"
> > but "listen"?) Is not irony central to the southern tempo, to a brisk style
> > that seeks to remain unstuck, unbogged down, uncaught? Is it not exactly
> > Nietzsche's aim to translate Petronius into German, but not the authoring of
> > a straight one-to-one translation (the seeking of equivalencies where there
> > are none), for such attempts can only be "involuntary vulgarizations" and
> > "falsifications of the original" due to the original's untranslatability
> > into any other tongue, its irreducibility to formulaic categories.
> > Nietzsche's attempt is thus a re-creation, a re-enactment, even a
> > re-invention (of language), but not an "imitation"...
> >
> > Steve C.
> >
> YES, yes, exactly! And with great satire no doubt, as a way of
> speaking freely, as the healthy effects of being able to take direct
> action that forms and informs itself, and that only needs a handful of
> fragments to sculpt a whole human personality whose best and worst do
> translate but in an incomparable way, maybe as Baudilaire did for Poe.
> It's also something that revives languages that no longer look back but
> forward or rather take the past into the unfolding future, setting the
> themes for the future which include the many possibilities left for
> musical inventions. Maybe as the Will to Singing. And on that
> enthusiastic note we hear the sobering voice of,
>
> John T. Duryea:
> "Well, yes, but with Nietzsche, enthusiasm is a mask and there
> is really no such thing as "unalloyed" praise from N. That is,
> N, the eternal preacher's son, was both moral critic and moral
> gospeller. He played the role of the sermonizing preacher pulling
> from his storehouse of knowledge "out-of-culture-experiences"
> in an effort to guide that still historically young and
> impressionable people..."
>
> To which I request a little more clarity on what suspicious undertone
> is detected in this context. Is it true that Ntz was such a barrel-organ
> all packed to the brim with knowledge, like so many fancy cards or
> cleverly written sermons? How could he sing unless he could forget and
> overcome the pressure and tension of being overfull? And what good are
> sermons if a preacher's son can't enjoy his freedom from trying to
> improve the world, from sermonizing?
>
> Leonardo Raggo///////\\\
> ac857@sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca
>
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By "out-of-culture-experiences" I meant two things:
1. Cutural differences in and of themselves; examples being Magian,
Chinese, Egyptian, Faustian and others. That is, while there is an
underlying human nature, we are all homo sapien sapiens, there are
differences due to culture. In other words, there is no such
thing as mankind, a nonsensical word, there are _mankinds_.
2. Differences due to "aging" within the cultural life cycle. Thus
one could roughly equate Zeno with Nietzsche or Alexander with
Napoleon or Mohammed with Luther in the sense that they were
contemporaneous within the cultural life cycle. In this sense
it is tenuous for N to hold up Petronius to the Germans (he did
write in German did he not?) as an ideal as Petronius was a
product, albiet a brilliant product, of the age of the Caesars,
an age which lacked the inner creative forces, forces still
possesed at the time of N's writings by the "blond barbarian".
John T. Duryea
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