Friedrich Nietzsche 尼采 · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

🔊At university he gave up theology for the study of Greek and Latin texts, and lost his faith. He was so able that in 1869, at twenty-four and before he had finished his doctorate, he was made professor of classical philology at Basel in Switzerland. He gave up his Prussian citizenship to take the post and was stateless for the rest of his life. In the war of 1870 he served for a few weeks as a medical orderly, saw the wounded, and came back ill. In Basel he had one great friendship, with the composer Richard Wagner, whom he regarded for some years as the man who would restore to Germany what tragedy had been to Greece.

上了大學之後，他放棄神學，改讀希臘文與拉丁文的文獻，並且失去了信仰。他的才華出眾到這個地步：1869 年，他二十四歲，博士學位還沒完成，就被聘為瑞士巴塞爾大學的古典語文學教授。為了就任，他放棄了普魯士國籍；此後終身沒有國籍。1870 年的戰爭裡，他當了幾個星期的醫護兵，見到了傷兵，回來的時候病了。在巴塞爾，他有過一段重要的友誼：與作曲家理查・華格納。有幾年，他把華格納看成那個能為德國恢復「悲劇之於希臘」的人。

🔊His first book, The Birth of Tragedy, appeared in 1872. It argued that Greek tragedy arose from the union of two forces, the clear form of Apollo and the intoxication of Dionysus, and that it died when Socratic rationalism taught the Greeks to believe that everything can be explained. Classical scholars were appalled. His students stopped coming. In the following years he broke with Wagner, whose nationalism and hatred of Jews disgusted him, and his health collapsed. He suffered from blinding headaches, vomiting, and failing eyesight. In 1879 he resigned his chair on a small pension.

他的第一本書《悲劇的誕生》在 1872 年問世。它主張：希臘悲劇誕生於兩股力量的結合——阿波羅的清晰形式，與戴奧尼索斯的陶醉；而當蘇格拉底式的理性主義教希臘人相信「一切都可以被解釋」的時候，悲劇就死了。古典學者大為驚駭。他的學生不來上課了。在隨後的幾年裡，他與華格納決裂；華格納的民族主義與對猶太人的仇恨令他作嘔。他的健康也垮了：使人眼前發黑的頭痛、嘔吐，視力一天比一天差。1879 年，他辭去教席，靠一筆微薄的退休金過活。

🔊For the next ten years he lived in rented rooms, moving with the seasons between the Swiss Alps in summer and the Italian and French coasts in winter, looking for a climate in which he could work. He walked for hours each day and wrote down his thoughts in notebooks. In 1882 he fell in love with a brilliant young Russian, Lou Salomé, who refused him. In the years after that he wrote the books by which he is known, among them Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and On the Genealogy of Morality. Some he paid to have printed. Few sold more than a few hundred copies.

接下來的十年，他住在租來的房間裡，隨著季節遷移：夏天在瑞士的阿爾卑斯山，冬天在義大利與法國的海岸，尋找一個他能工作的氣候。他每天步行好幾個小時，把想法記在筆記本裡。1882 年，他愛上了一位才華洋溢的俄國年輕女子露・莎樂美；她拒絕了他。在那之後的幾年，他寫下了使他為人所知的那些書，其中有《查拉圖斯特拉如是說》、《善惡的彼岸》與《論道德的系譜》。有些是他自己出錢印的。賣超過幾百本的沒有幾本。

🔊In 1888, in a burst of energy, he wrote five short books in a year. On January 3, 1889, he collapsed in a street in Turin. A story told later says that he had thrown his arms around the neck of a cab horse that was being beaten. In the days that followed he sent letters to friends signed “Dionysus” and “The Crucified.” A friend came and took him to a clinic. He never recovered his mind. He lived for eleven more years, cared for by his mother and then by his sister, and died in Weimar in 1900. The cause of his illness is still disputed.

1888 年，他精力勃發，一年之內寫了五本小書。1889 年 1 月 3 日，他在杜林的一條街上倒下了。後來流傳的一個故事說，他抱住了一匹正在被鞭打的拉車馬的脖子。在隨後的幾天，他寄信給朋友，署名「戴奧尼索斯」與「被釘十字架者」。一位朋友趕來，把他送進了診所。他的神智再也沒有恢復。他又活了十一年，先由母親、後來由妹妹照顧；1900 年在威瑪去世。他的病因至今仍有爭議。

🔊His fame began in those years of silence, and his sister took charge of it. Elisabeth had married a leader of the anti-Semitic movement and gone with him to found a “pure German” colony in Paraguay, which failed. Returning, she gained control of her brother’s papers, founded an archive, and published selections from his notebooks under a title of her own, The Will to Power, arranged to suit her politics. She lived to welcome Hitler to the archive. Nietzsche had despised the anti-Semites, his brother-in-law among them, and had called nationalism a sickness. It took scholars half a century after the war to separate what he wrote from what was made of him.

他的名聲，是在那些沉默的歲月裡開始的；而他的妹妹接管了它。伊莉莎白嫁給了反猶運動的一位領袖，跟著他到巴拉圭去建立一個「純正日耳曼」的殖民地；那個殖民地失敗了。她回來之後，取得了哥哥手稿的控制權，設立了一個檔案館，並且從他的筆記本裡選出一些段落，用她自己取的書名《權力意志》出版，編排得合乎她的政治立場。她活到了在檔案館迎接希特勒的那一天。尼采鄙視反猶主義者，他的妹夫也在其中；他也說過民族主義是一種病。戰後，學者花了半個世紀，才把他寫的東西與別人拿他做成的東西分開。