Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography

12 Translator's Preface

In 1967, the Italian scholars Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari
began publication of a groundbreaking complete critical edition of
Nietzsche's published and unpublished works, followed by an eight-
volume edition of his letters. These editions have allowed readers of
German to examine all extant writings by Nietzsche, and have provided
the foundation for subsequent Nietzsche scholarship in all parts of the
world.
Unfortunately, there is as yet no English counterpart to this critical
edition of Nietzsche's works. Walter Kaufmann's English renderings of
a series of individual texts and compilations and his influential schol-
arly analyses represented a milestone in Anglo-American Nietzsche
scholarship, but they predate the critical edition. Several additional
translations by Kaufmann's collaborator R. J. Hollingdale appeared in
the series Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Among the
more recent noteworthy translations of individual texts are those by
Marion Faber, Carol Diethe, Douglas Smith, and Duncan Large.
A promising new development in Nietzsche studies is a planned
twenty-volume set of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, which was
launched under the editorship of Ernst Behler. Three volumes of this
set (Unfashionable Observations, Human, All Too Human /, and Unpubäshed
Fragments from the Period of Unfashionable Observations) have appeared in
outstanding translations by Richard T. Gray and Gary Handwerk.
Owing to Behler's untimely death, the project was on hiatus, but addi-
tional volumes are now in preparation.
When I first embarked on the translation of Nietzsche: A Philosophical
Biographjy I planned to cite published English translations for the
Nietzsche passages wherever these were available. As the project pro-
gressed, this approach proved ill-advised for two reasons. First, the word-
ing of the available translations too often clashed with the particular
nuances of Rüdiger Safiranski's interpretations and therefore tended to
detract from an understanding of the texts under discussion. Second,
translations that predated the Colli/Montinari critical edition failed to