One essay from Thus Spoke Zarathustra: The Speeches of Zarathustra.

I took on another challenging task, even though I didn’t have as much time as I thought! Nevertheless, I managed to translate another part of Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” which I believe closely relates to the current human situation and way of life. Although Nietzsche seems to be a bitter and pessimistic philosopher, I find that he made valid points about the human condition that, in my opinion, he addressed reasonably.

His writing style is poetic and difficult to translate, using old-fashioned German. I did my best to make it more apprehensive. I hope you enjoy it.🙏💖🌹

(The word Hinterweltler literally means Backworlders, but he intends to show the unknown people living behind and around the subjects, unaware of the centre. I couldn’t find any word in English that matched this one, so I didn’t translate it!).

About The Hinterweltler

Zarathustra once cast his madness beyond man, like all other Hinterweltlers. The world seemed to me to be the work of a suffering and tormented God.

The world seemed to me a dream, the poetry of god-coloured smoke before the eyes of one who was divinely dissatisfied.

Good and evil and pleasure and pain and I and you – it seemed to me like coloured smoke before creative eyes. The Creator wanted to look away from himself – so he created the world. It is a drunken pleasure for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and lose himself. The world seemed to me to be one and the same: drunken pleasure and losing oneself.

This world… eternally imperfect, an image and an imperfect image of an eternal contradiction – a drunken pleasure of its imperfect Creator – so the world once seemed to me.

So I, too, once cast my madness beyond man, like all Hinterweltlern. Beyond man in truth? Their books, too, this God that I created was the work of man and madness, like all gods!

He was human, and only a poor piece of human and I: This ghost came to me from my own ashes and embers, and honestly! It did not come to me from the beyond!

What happened, my brothers? I overcame myself, the sufferer, I carried my own ashes to the mountain, I invented a brighter flame for myself. And behold! Then the ghost left me!

It would be suffering for me now and torment for those who have recovered to believe in such ghosts: it would be suffering for me now and humiliation. So I speak to the Hinterweltlern.

It was an unfortunate, and inability – that created all the Hinterweltlern: and that brief madness of happiness that only the most suffering experience.

Tiredness that wants to reach the last will with one leap; with a deathly leap, one poor, ignorant tiredness that no longer even wants to want: that created all gods and Hinterwelten.
Believe me, my brothers! It was the body that despaired at the end – it heard the belly of the being speaking to it.
And then it wanted to go through the last walls with its head, and not just with its head – over to “that world”.

But ‘that world’ is well bent before man, that dehumanized, inhuman world which is a heavenly nothingness, and the belly of being does not speak to man at all, unless as a human being.

Truly, all beings are difficult to prove and difficult to make them speak. Tell me, brothers, is it not the most wonderful of all things, the best proven?

Yes, this ego and the ego’s contradiction and confusion still speaks most honestly about its being, this creative, willing, evaluating ego, which is the measure and the world of things.
And this honest being, the ego – that speaks of the body, and it still wants the body, even when it writes poetry and raves and flutters with broken wings.

Constantly learns to speak more and more honestly, the ego: and the more it learns, the more it finds words and honours for body and earth.
My ego taught me a new pride, and I teach it to people: no longer to bury one’s head in the sand of heavenly things but to carry it freely, an earthly head that gives meaning to the earth!

I teach people a new will: to want this path that man has blindly walked, to welcome it, and no longer sneak away from it like the sick and dying.

It was the sick and dying who despised body and earth and found the heavenly and the redeeming blood stopper, but they also took these sweet and dark poisons from body and earth.

They wanted to escape their misery, and the stars were too far away for them. Then they sighed: >Oh if only there were heavenly ways to sneak into another existence and happiness!< – So they invented their tricks and bloody potions! They thought they were now removed from their bodies and this earth, these ungrateful people. But whom did they thank for their rapture, their pain and their bliss? Their bodies and this earth.

Zarathustra is gentle with the sick. Indeed, he is not angry with their forms of consolation and ingratitude. May they recover and conquer and create a higher body for themselves!
Zarathustra is not angry with the recovering people either when he looks tenderly upon their madness and sneaks around the grave of their God at midnight: But illness and a sick body remain for me, and their tears still remain.

There have always been many sick people among those who write poetry and are God-addicted; they furiously hate those who know and that youngest of virtues, which is called honesty.

They always look back to dark times. Of course, madness and faith were two different things then; the madness of reason was godlike, and doubt was a sin.

I know these godlike people all too well: They want people to believe in them, and doubt is a sin. I also know all too well what they themselves believe in best.

Truly not in the Hinterwelten and redeeming drops of blood, but they instead believe best in the body, and their own body is their thing for itself.

But it is a sick matter to them, and they would gladly lose their temper. That is why they listen to the preachers of death and preach about the Hinterwelten.

Listen to me instead, my brothers, to the voice of the healthy body: This is a more honest and purer voice.

The healthy body speaks more honestly and more purely, the perfect and right-angled one: And it speaks of the meaning of the earth.

The image on top by Jay Coby Art