The Journal of Nietzsche Studies

With the appearance in August 2011 of Dawn, the Stanford University Press translation of the Colli-Montinari Kritische Studienausgabe as The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche resumed after a twelve-year hiatus. I have discussed some of the history of this project in a prior issue of the journal.¹ Here I would like to bring readers up to date on the current status of the translation project, address some of the factors that make the translations in this project unique, and discuss some of the translation issues that the editors and translators have had to confront.

I have been involved with the translation project for Stanford since 2001 and have officially overseen its production since signing a contract in 2005. Keith Ansell-Pearson served as my coeditor for several years, and he appears, along with myself and Duncan Large, as co-editor of Dawn. The next volume to appear, Human, All Too Human II, will be the first redesigned volume that includes the relevant Nachlass notebooks along with Mixed Opinions and Maxims and The Wanderer and His Shadow in a single volume. Keith assisted with this volume, but Duncan and I will appear as its editors, as will be the case for the subsequent volumes.

The translations that will appear in forthcoming volumes of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche will be unique in several ways. For one thing, they will be the only English translations that fully reproduce Mazzino Montinari's editorial apparatus as it appears in the KSA. In addition, both Montinari's editorial notes and the texts themselves will include all significant revisions and corrections that have appeared in the various Nachbericht volumes of the Kritische Gesamtausgabe that have been published since the last revision of the KSA in 1988. This will make the translations that appear in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche the most accurate translations available in print form since they will be derived from the most felicitous versions of Nietzsche's texts and notebooks currently available in any language. [End Page 355]

A second distinguishing feature of the translations, and one reflecting the particular responsibilities that come with overseeing a translation of a "critical edition" as opposed to another sort of translation, is that there will be a level of textual fidelity that might not be deemed necessary in another sort of translation. While textual fidelity might be a component of any critical edition, it is especially important for a writer who attended to stylistic detail to the degree that we find in Nietzsche's works. This will be made clear to readers of this edition who attend to the changes, often quite minor, that distinguish the published versions from the earlier variants that will be listed in the editorial notes and the associated Nachlass volumes. For this reason, the translations will include all of Nietzsche's single and double underlines as well as follow his paragraph structure and his use of quotation marks and other punctuation.²

A third feature that will significantly distinguish these volumes is that the editors and translators view themselves as a team, and there will be significant collaboration across volumes to insure consistency. This will manifest itself in a number of ways. For example, the passages from earlier texts that appear in Ecce Homo will be identical to those same passages as they appear in the earlier texts, as the translators are sharing their work in those cases when Nietzsche cites from his own earlier writings. Similarly, because the translator of a particular text will also be the translator of the associated notebooks for that text, there will complete consistency of translation between text and notebooks. And the translators have been instructed to strive for a degree of translation consistency that will, as much as possible, allow readers to recognize the specificity of Nietzsche's own word choice. So, in addition to the translators rendering Nietzsche's words as much as possible the same way throughout each individual volume, the translators and editors have decided to privilege certain key terminology by rendering them with the same English phrasing throughout all of the volumes.

Among...