[16] Schrecken and Mitleiden are the German terms for pity and fear, or phobos and eleos. I translate Mitleiden as ruth (as opposed to ruthless) instead of pity. Although that may not always be correct, it often is, and this suggestion may help us to hear anew—in English—what is often problematically translated as pity in Nietzsche’s corpus. Although not commonly used nowadays, Shakespeare used the word ruth numerous times in his plays, as does Milton in his poem Lycidas.
[17] The extraordinary declaration by “Deep Midnight” that although the world is deep and deeper than day is aware, and its woe is deep, joy is “deeper still than misery” (Z: III.15 §3).
[18] Philip Grundlehner, The Poetry of Friedrich Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 35.
[19] Of the two major studies of Nietzsche’s poetry in English, neither makes this crucial connection. See Grundlehner (Ibid.), and Rohit Sharma, On the Seventh Solitude: Endless Becoming and Eternal Return in the Poetry of Friedrich Nietzsche (London: Peter Lang, 2006).
[20] Translation modified — for “Stückwerk” Hollingdale has “fragmentary” and for “Stücken” he has “fragments,” but this is not wholly accurate, especially since “fragmentarisch” is the specific German word for “fragmentary” and “Fragmente” (or “Bruchstücke”) is the specific German word for “fragments.” Whenever speaking of fragments, Nietzsche uses the latter two words, and his specificity here must not only be honored in translation, but in interpretation. If Hollingdale’s translation isn’t necessarily “wrong,” but interpretive, since there is a specific word for “fragment” in German and Nietzsche does not use it in this case, the translation should be as precise as Nietzsche. Unlike Aufgeheben, Stückwerk is not rife with ambiguity or multiple meanings. There is no intractability here in terms of a corresponding word in English. Nietzsche clearly seems to deliberately differentiate his work as fragmentary in the philosophical sense, but that is different from stating that its structure is, in the common sense of the word, fragmentary. Here is the entire Stück in German: “Meint ihr denn, es müsse Stückwerk sein, weil man es euch in Stücken giebt (und geben muss)?” The necessity of writing in such a manner for the modern age and the modern reader, who lacks the ability for sustained concentration, may be but one reason why Nietzsche chose to give his works to us in “Stücken.” See Jill Marsden’s “Art of the Aphorism” for a slightly different view of this in Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), and consider Nietzsche’s own view that Daybreak is a book that one can “dip in and out of” — that may however be ironic.
[21] Walter Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” Selected Writings, Vol. I, 1913–1926 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996; 1999), 136.
[22] In BT, Nietzsche extols the community over the individual while he often praises the whole as what is highest. In GS he speaks of the one or the whole as praiseworthy, too, while in TI the whole is extolled over the individual, which N says is the “lie of the philosopher.” One of the things which Nietzsche admires Goethe for is his ability to unite all into one, into an ordered whole (TI: SUM §49).
[23] Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche’s Task: An Interpretation of Beyond Good and Evil (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2004), 7.
[24] Science, Culture, and Free Spirits: A Study of Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2009).
[25] Camelia Elias, The Fragment: Towards a History and Poetics of a Performative Genre (Bern; Berlin: Peter Lang, 2004), 9.
[26] Aside from reading Nietzsche in his native — Saxon — German as Babette Babich has implored, or rather, hearing him recited in Saxon-inflected German, as Paolo D’Iorio has recently emphasized, what is also of utmost importance for our interpretive efforts is returning to Nietzsche’s manuscripts themselves, for they offer illuminating insights even the published books cannot. See Paolo d’Iorio, “The Eternal Return: Genesis and Interpretation,” tr. by Frank Chouraqui, The Agonist, Vol. III, Issue 2 (winter 2010).
[27] Julian Johnson, Mahler’s Voices: Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 200.
[28] Georges Liebert, Nietzsche and Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 8.
[29] There is scant to little material on the synaesthetic dimension of Nietzsche’s philosophy, but it demands thorough and sustained treatments. Sarah Kofman, though not referring to it as such, briefly touches upon it (and this is the first consideration of the topic (first published in French in 1973) as far as I’m aware) in her Nietzsche and Metaphor (California: Stanford University Press, 1994), as does Babette Babich in her Words in Blood, Like Flowers (New York: SUNY Press, 2006), though her treatment is also brief. The only studies strictly devoted to the topic include Diana Behler, “Synaesthesia in Nietzsche’s Die Geburt der Tragödie and Its Correlation to French and Russian Symbolism,” Carrefour de Cultures, ed. Régis Antoine (Tübingen: Narr, 1993), 169–80, and Clive Cazeaux, “Sound and Synaesthesia in Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty,” Proceedings of the Sound Practice Conference (Dartington: Dartington College of Arts, 2001): 35–40. The former article only focuses on BT and suffers from a myopic understanding of the phenomenon, if not of Nietzsche; the latter, though brief and only concerned with TL, is still a rich and suggestive article even though Merleau-Ponty receives the lion’s share of its focus. For the first sustained analysis of the topic, see Rainer J. Hanshe’s “Nietzsche’s Synaesthetic Epistemology & the Restitution of the Holistic Human,” in Nietzsche & the Becoming of Life, eds. Vanessa Lemm & Miguel Vatter (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012).
[30] Babich, Ibid., 106.