Translating the Colli-Montinari Kritische Studienausgabe

Alan D. Schrift

The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 33, Spring 2007, pp. 64-72 (Article) Published by Penn State University Press DOI: 10.1353/nie.2007.0013

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Philologica Translating the Colli-Montinari Kritische Studienausgabe ALAN D. SCHRIFT

his brief essay addresses the current state of the Stanford University Press translation of the Colli-Montinari Kritische Studienausgabe as The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche and describes some of the particular issues that confront translating a critical edition of this sort. As some readers may know, Keith Ansell Pearson and I have taken over the general editorship of this translation project, which has languished since the death of Ernst Behler in 1997. Most readers probably also know very little about what has been happening since the last volume, Unpublished Writings from the Period of Unfashionable Observations, was published in 1999.1 In what follows, I shall briefly review the history of the translation project, discuss some of the changes I have made to the original project as designed by Behler, let you know what is happening now, and then detail some translation issues that Ansell Pearson and I have confronted. Parts of the history are commonly known, but much may be quite surprising to some. One of the peculiar features of this particular project is its complicated copyright arrangement, and this bears significantly on aspects of the future of portions of the project. Contrary to what is widely believed, the copyright for the Colli-Montinari edition is not owned by Walter de Gruyter. The original copyright for the edition prepared by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, which they began in Florence in 1958, was owned by the small Italian publishing house Adelphi Edizioni. Colli and Montinaris original plan was to publish an Italian translation of Nietzsches complete works, working primarily from the nineteenvolume Grossoktavausgabe, published in Leipzig from 1894 to 1926, and correcting it when necessary by comparing it with the other available German translations. As they compared the available German texts of the Nachlass, however, the discrepancies between editions led them to doubt the reliability of the texts they had at their disposal in Florence, and, as Montinari puts it, a troubled scholarly conscience advised him to travel to the Goethe-Schiller Archiv in Weimar to examine the actual manuscripts, which he did for the first time in April 1961.2 After Montinari returned to Florence, he and Colli came to the conclusion that what was needed was a translation in chronological order of
JOURNAL OF NIETZSCHE STUDIES, Issue 33, 2007 Copyright 2007 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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the complete Nachlass, and it was at that point in time that the idea of a critical edition first came to light. This new project was bigger than the small Adelphi press could handle, however, and it asked the French publisher ditions Gallimard for assistance. In September 1962, Adelphi and Gallimard came to an agreement, with Adelphi granting Gallimard the French-language rights and a share of control of other rights. Montinari had been trying since 1961 to get a German publisher to agree to publish a German edition, but this did not happen until after two events in 1964: the publication of the first Italian translations by Adelphi and the presentation by Colli and Montinari of a paper titled Etat des textes de Nietzsche at the Colloquium on Nietzsche organized by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze at Royaumont.3 At the meeting at Royaumont, Colli and Montinari met and spoke about their project with Karl Lwith, who returned to Germany and in February 1965 persuaded Heinz Wenzel, then the managing editor of the humanities section at Walter de Gruyter, to acquire the rights from Adelphi and Gallimard to publish the Colli-Montinari edition in its original language. The first German volumes began appearing in 1967, and the project is not yet complete.4 Let me emphasize that despite the fact that the original text was in German, de Gruyter licensed the German rights from Adelphi and Gallimard. As it is an international company, de Gruyter initially purchased both German and English rights and planned to issue an English edition at the same time that it acquired the German rights. But, like Adelphi earlier, it got cold feet and had financial concerns about the English-language edition. Ernst Behler and Stanford University Press first approached Adelphi/Gallimard in the early 1980s to request English rights, but they were told at that time that de Gruyter still retained the option for an English-language edition. A year or so later, de Gruyter concluded that it would never be able to complete its English-language project, and it formally returned English-language rights to Adelphi and Gallimard, which immediately contacted Stanford. Soon after, an agreement was signed for an English-language translation of the Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA).5 I am uncertain as to when Ernst Behler originally signed a contract with Stanford to publish the KSA and as to whether Behler was joined by Bernd Magnus at the outset of the translation project, though I think Behler and Magnus began the project as coeditors, with Behler clearly in charge and primarily responsible for the organization of the volumes. I do know that at the outset, the English-language edition was planned for twenty volumes rather than the fifteen volumes of the KSA, and the initial projected roster of translators included a number of distinguished Nietzsche scholars, including James OFlaherty, Frederick Love, Peter Heller, and Joan Stambaugh in addition to Magnus and Behler themselves. It is not clear when this roster was changed, but when the translation project actually began and contracts and advances were paid, the volumes were largely assigned to Behlers colleagues in the German or Comparative

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Literature Departments at the University of Washington: Ernsts wife, Diana Behler, was assigned The Birth of Tragedy and the Nachlass in KSA 1 and 7; Richard Gray was assigned Unfashionable Observations and its associated Nachlass; Gary Handwerk was assigned Human, All Too Human and its associated Nachlass; Steven Taubeneck had Joyful Science and its Nachlass; Brittain Smith had Dawn and its Nachlass; Graham Parkes had Zarathustra and its Nachlass; and Magnus and Behler were to translate all the texts following Zarathustra along with all the post-Zarathustra Nachlass. To date, three of these originally assigned volumes have appeared. Richard Gray finished both of his volumes, with Volume 2: Unfashionable Observations coming out as the first volume in 1995 and the Nachlass to Unfashionable Observations being the third and latest volume to appear in 1999.6 Between Grays translations, Gary Handwerks translation of Human, All Too Human (I) appeared as volume 3.7 What happened between Behlers death in 1997 and my getting involved with the project in 2001 is not easy to reconstruct, but a few things are clear to me. Bernd Magnus signed a contract in April 1999 to serve as exclusive editor. In the years between 1997 and 2001, Handwerk, Taubeneck, and Smith continued to work on their respective translations of Human, All Too Human, Joyful Science, and Dawn. But their contact with Magnus was sparse and eventually became nonexistent, and they each came to put the project aside, waiting to hear from Magnus or Stanford as to what was happening. I suspect I was not the only Nietzsche scholar during these years to stop at the Stanford University Press booth at an American Philosophical Association (APA) meeting and ask about the status of the translation project. My involvement with the project in fact is the result of one of these conversations, as I had a chat with then philosophy editor Helen Tartar at an APA Eastern meeting in 2001 that led to a more lengthy discussion, which resulted eventually in her asking me whether I would like to take over the editorship, because she had lost all contact with Magnus and no longer had confidence in his willingness to complete the project. It took Stanford several years to eventually sever its contractual relationship with Magnus, during which time I initially hoped to have Dan Conway join me as coeditor. Conway and I did, eventually, sign a contract with Stanford in 2005, but because of both personal and professional reasons, Conway stepped down and was replaced by Keith Ansell Pearson, who has been actively working with me to get the project back on track. And I am happy to report that it is back on track, with a revised publication schedule that anticipates the final volume to appear in 2013. I now wish to describe some of the changes I have made to Behlers original plan for the twenty volumes and where things are at the present moment. I have to say that had I been involved with this project at the outset, I would have organized it differently and would also have prioritized the order of publication

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differently. The main change I would have made, and have now tried to make where it is still possible, is that I would have published texts in a single volume with their associated Nachlass in those cases where this makes scholarly sense. This is, by the way, the way the French edition was published by Gallimard, and it makes a good deal more sense to me to publish the volumes this way, rather than the way they appear in the KSA, where the vast majority of the Nachlass appears in volumes 713, with the published texts largely making up volumes 16. Obviously, some Nachlass volumes are not easily associated with particular texts, and this is especially true of the texts that follow Zarathustra. But in the earlier works, it seems clear that some notebooks are pertinent to particular texts, and I would have liked to publish the Nachlass associated with both Unfashionable Observations and Human, All Too Human I with their respective published works. Because Unfashionable Observations and Human, All Too Human I are already published, this is no longer possible. But I have reorganized some of the other works and plan to have the texts of Human, All Too Human II and Joyful Science published along with their respective Nachlass notebooks in single volumes. What will result, then, is a nineteen- rather than twenty-volume edition, with volume 19 including both the cumulative index originally planned and a translation of the Chronik of Nietzsches life that appears in KSA 15. As to where things stand now, the translation of Dawn is complete and has been reviewed by both Ansell Pearson and myself. We are waiting only for the Translators Afterword, and I expect that this volume will appear in 2007. Gary Handwerk had completed a rough draft of his translation of Human, All Too Human II several years ago and since the summer has been back working on it and expects to have it complete soon. He then hopes to finish the 100 or so pages of the Nachlass to Human, All Too Human II, and this volume also may appear in 2007 or early 2008. The translation of Joyful Science is also far along, so I am hoping to see the draft of that quite soon. The other volumes are just now beginning to be translated, and Ansell Pearson and I have assembled a new team of translators for almost all of the remaining volumes: Paul S. Loeb (Philosophy Department, University of Puget Sound) and his colleague David Tinsley (German Department, University of Puget Sound) have been contracted to translate Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the two associated Nachlass volumes, KSA 10 and 11. Christa Davis Acampora (Philosophy Department, Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York) is lined up for the translations of two volumes: Beyond Good and Evil/On the Genealogy of Morality in KSA 5 as well as portions of KSA 11. Carol Diethe has been contracted for the 1888 texts in KSA 6, as well as the Nachlass of KSA 12. And Babette Babich (Philosophy Department, Fordham University) will translate the Nachlass in KSA 13, with Babich and Diethe sharing their work so that there will be translation consistency between the translations of the two final Nachlass volumes. What remains are KSA 1, which includes The

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Birth of Tragedy and other texts, and the volume with the Nachlass from the same period, and these volumes should be under contract soon. One final point about the current state of the English translation of the ColliMontinari edition needs to be mentioned here, and that concerns the Cambridge University Press translations of Nietzsches works and their relation to the Stanford translation of the KSA. Here I do not know whether to frame the issue as a comedy of errors, gross incompetence, or intentional malfeasance. One thing is clear to me, however: Cambridge University Press has for several years been in what Stanford University Presss lawyers are calling a gross violation of Stanfords exclusive copyright of the English translation of the KSA. So far as I can tell, all of the Cambridge translations, with the exceptions of the early translations by R. J. Hollingdale of Untimely Meditations and Human, All Too Human and Carol Diethes translation of On the Genealogy of Morality, explicitly acknowledge using the Colli-Montinari edition as well as the KSA editorial apparatus.8 This means that the new Cambridge translations of The Birth of Tragedy, The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Beyond Good and Evil and the new edition of the 1888 books that appear in the series Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy are all in violation of Stanfords copyright.9 How this happened is not entirely clear, but two hypotheses have emerged: either Cambridge simply thought the texts were in the public domain or, equally possible, Cambridge asked de Gruyter for permission to use the Colli-Montinari edition and whoever at de Gruyter gave permission did not know that the permission was not de Gruyters to give. What is going to happen with these already published volumes is not clear. More important to me, however, as general editor of the authorized English translations of the Colli-Montinari edition, are two other Cambridge volumes: Rdiger Bittners edition of Writings from the Late Notebooks and a volume not yet published of Writings from the Early Notebooks.10 Although one could make the argument that the published texts are, in fact, in the public domain and the difference between the public domain texts and the Colli-Montinari texts are, in most cases, negligible, the published and planned Cambridge translations of selections from the Nachlass are clearly in violation of Stanfords exclusive English-language copyright. My hope is that Stanford will be able to block the publication of the forthcoming volume of selections from the early notebooks and will be able to force Cambridge to withdraw the already published Bittner volume. But for now, this is all in the hands of lawyers from Stanford, Cambridge, Gallimard, and Adelphi. Let me now turn to some of the particular responsibilities I believe come with overseeing a translation of a critical edition as opposed to another sort of translation. I suppose the first point is that I think in the translation of a critical edition there must be a level of textual fidelity, which might be treated less strictly in another sort of translation. This textual fidelity manifests itself in several ways. First, I think it places a constraint on the translator in terms of the kinds of notes

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that are appropriate. By this, I mean that the translators interventions in the text should be scrupulously restricted to notes that are informative rather than interpretive. Many translators feel it their responsibility to help readers make sense of the texts they are reading, and to that end, they offer all sorts of helpful suggestions as to what the authors they are translating might mean by their words. Sometimes these notes can be genuinely helpful, but even when they are helpful, there are times when translators step over a line, a line that I do not believe is always as clear as my comment here might be implying, and offer interpretations of the text in their editorial remarks. At the same time, my own hermeneutic commitments make me well aware that there is interpretation in every act of translation, but when one considers, for example, the sort of translators notes that often appear in Walter Kaufmanns translations, I hope my point is clear. So, the Stanford edition will avoid notes that suggest what Nietzsche might be meaning and will instead include notes that identify authors and books mentioned by Nietzsche, mythological and historical names and events, quotes, foreign words and expressions, and biographical facts of Nietzsches own life. In addition, an important task of the notes is to present problems and difficulties of the translation, such as puns and untranslatable figures of speech, and there will also be notes explaining the translators choice of translation in cases where there is a strong case to be made for an alternative translation. In addition to interpretive restraint in terms of the translators interventions into the text, I think the level of textual fidelity required of a critical edition should manifest itself in other ways as well. For example, it is incumbent on a critical edition to reproduce exactly Nietzsches emphases (whether underlined or bold) as well as his punctuation and paragraph structure. In addition, I think the translations should strive for a degree of translation consistency that might not be either required or even desirable in another translation. In other words, to take a couple of examples from The Birth of Tragedy, it seems more important in a critical edition to decide, say, that Schein will be translated consistently as appearance or Gleichnis as likeness and to stick to this as much as possible, while noting any instance where the translation decided upon has been altered. In this way, the reader will be able to get a sense of Nietzsches specific word choice that might be lost, as is the case in other translations, where Schein might be translated sometimes as appearance, other times as illusion, other times as semblance, and so on. This commitment to consistency might not hold across volumes and, indeed, perhaps should not, as Nietzsche might very well have changed his own sense of what he meant by a certain word over time. But it seems less likely that he would do so within a single text and the notebooks he was writing at a particular time, and so we are going to strive for a degree of translation consistency that might not be appropriate to another sort of translation.

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Having said this, I should add that, as we have worked through the translation of Dawn, Ansell Pearson and I have in fact already made several decisions along these lines that we are going to encourage all the translators to follow unless they persuade us that it is a mistake in their particular volume. For example, it seems to us that Nietzsches interest in biology and drive theory warrant the consistent translation across all his works of Trieb as drive and Instinkt as instinct. Similarly, the strong response Nietzsche has to both Kant and Schopenhauer will lead us to encourage all of the translators to render Vorstellung as representation whenever possible and note those instances when representation translates Darstellung. A third example along these lines is that we will try to indicate, as Nietzsche puts it in Ecce Homo, his radical repudiation of the very concept of being (EH BT 3) by consistently translating Werden, whether as noun or verb, with some form of becoming, thereby avoiding any locution that might conflate becoming with the metaphysically quite different coming to be. Another editorial decision concerns the attempt to render consistently across Nietzsches works his genealogical vocabulary. As is well discussed in the literature, Nietzsches genealogical vocabulary, which is highlighted in Foucaults famous essay of 1971, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, was at work in his texts well before On the Genealogy of Morals.11 Although terms such as Ursprung, Herkunft, Entstehung, Abkunft, and even Geburt could all be translated by the same or very similar words, depending on the context, we think that it will be helpful to readers to attend to the specificity of Nietzsches use of these words, and the way to do this will be to decide on privileged translation, which will be indicated in each translation by a note at the first use, and all departures from this privileged translation will also be indicated by a note explaining the departure. After examining how these terms function in Dawn and On the Genealogy of Morals, we have decided on the following: Ursprung will always be rendered as origin; Herkunft, as descent; Entstehung, as emergence; Abkunft, as lineage; and Geburt, as birth. Though some of these decisions were easy and obvious, others, such as rendering Abkunft as lineage rather than beginning or origination or even parentage, are somewhat arbitrary. But we think this arbitrariness will be compensated for by a translation consistency that will allow readers easy access to Nietzsches own particular word choice when addressing the question of genealogy. One other translation decision might be of interest, as it goes against what has been the standard in most previous translations. We have decided that there is a significant difference to be drawn between how Nietzsche conceives of pity and compassion, and we think that it has been a mistake in most of the previous translations to render Mitleid as pity, which loses entirely the positive sense of fellow feeling connoted by the mit. Whereas pity is consistently regarded by Nietzsche

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as something negative and harmful, we think his understanding of compassion is quite different and often quite positive. We are going to therefore request that all of our translators instead render Mitleid as compassion and translate Erbarmen as pity. This will create some problems with translating terms that are variants of Mitleid such as Bemitleidenwerden because compassion does not lend itself to a verb form as readily as pity does. So, in those cases, we will ask translators to insert a note to the effect that in some cases Mitleid will be translated as pity instead of compassion in order to accommodate the ensuing Bemitleidenwerden being rendered to be pitied, which cannot be rendered using compassion (although we are still considering for the latter becoming the object of compassion). I would like to take this opportunity to mention one final translation decision that we are considering and which I suspect may not be universally welcomed as the right decision. The translators of our Zarathustra volumes have persuaded us with strong argument that it is appropriate to translate the relatively uncommon noun form bermensch as the superhuman, rendering the much more common adjectival bermenschlich as superhuman, without the definite article. Here a number of factors have gone into this decision. First, we all agreed that it is a mistake to translate the gender-neutral Mensch by the gender-specific man, and throughout Zarathustra and the associated notebooks, Mensch will be translated as human. Second, we feel that overhuman, though it does preserve the ber that echoes throughout Zarathustra in berwindung (overcoming), bergehen (going over), and so forth, is far less elegant than superhuman, especially in its adjectival form, which is uncommon in neither standard English nor standard German. And although it has become something of a standard in English scholarship to leave bermensch untranslated, one could argue that we are far enough removed from the resonances of Clark Kent and Superman as to no longer need the non-English term to prevent the kinds of crude misunderstandings that might have arisen when Kaufmann and Hollingdale did their translations. Finally, to make a positive argument, Nietzsches use of bermensch derives much of its meaning from the contrast among bermensch, Mensch, and Unmensch. If there is no problem translating the latter two as human and inhuman, then it seems to make sense to us to translate der bermensch as the superhuman and to preserve the contrasts that will be readily apparent to English readers among the inhuman, human, and superhuman and inhumanity, humanity, and superhumanity. Although the Latinate super does not reproduce all of the senses of the German ber, it reproduces enough of them, and what is lost is, we think, compensated for by the production of an English translation that preserves the contrasts mentioned above and also does not refuse to find an appropriate English translation for even the most innovative and neologistic of Nietzsches German prose.

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NOTES
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Unpublished Writings from the Period of Unfashionable Observations, vol. 11 of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Richard Gray (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 2. Mazzino Montinari, The New Critical Edition of Nietzsches Complete Works, trans. David P. Thatcher, The Malahat Review 24 (October 1972): 124. 3. This paper was published as Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Etat des textes de Nietzsche, in Nietzsche: Cahiers du Royaumont (Paris: Editions du Minuit, 1967), 12740. 4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967). I have pieced together this story from personal correspondence with Alan Harvey, the director of Publishing and Acquisitions at Stanford University Press, and information found in Montinari, The New Critical Edition of Nietzsches Complete Works, 12133. 5. Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 196788). 6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Unfashionable Observations, vol. 2 of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Richard Gray (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). 7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human I, vol. 3 of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Gary Handwerk (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 8. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality and Other Writings, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 9. Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche: The Gay Science with a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ed. Robert Pippin, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche: The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, ed. Aaron Ridley, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 10. Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche: Writings from the Late Notebooks, ed. Rdiger Bittner, trans. Kate Sturge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 11. See Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (1971), in Language, CounterMemory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 13964.