On Fri, 8 Jun 2007, BklynMagus wrote:
> All this educated chat about Nietzche makes me want to read the old boy.
> So I ask: which translation into English is best for someone who cannot
> tackle him in the original?
Back when I taught Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann was still clearly and by far the best and had been for decades. I don't even know if anyone has really tried since for the major works, he's been so dominant. I've compared him with the original with many different books, and while you can always carp, he's usually right and his sentences and paragraphs are always fluent -- I learned things from him just as often as I differed from him. Just skip his introductions and all his commentary where he tries to prove Nietzsche was a proto-analytic philosopher. He has one kind of absurd idea, which many people have noted, where he translated "Ueberman" as "overman" rather than superman. But every great translator is allowed a few personal hobbyhorses, that that one is very easy to correct in your mind.
As for a starting point, if you're going to read one book, I'd make it Genealogy of Morals.
Have fun,
Michael