Thus Spake Zarathustra (AmazonClassics Edition) Kindle Edition

I assumed this would be strange and hard to follow and I wasn't disappointed in that. It was hard for me to get into the story but once I grew accustomed to the tempo I enjoyed reading it. I'll look now for some commentary to explain the finer points but I believe the overall sentiment is that morality is a human construct and not a cosmological law.

Nietzsche gets on top of a soapbox and starts shouting down at the world and it is amazing. Never read such a masterful work before, the cry for man to abandon the idea of god and become a Superman is a cry that reverberates throughout our entire world and cultures. It has seeped itself into literature and comic books and music and the consciousness of men waking up in this new world. A work needed to be read by all.

This is a terrible translation from 1909 that butchers the book. In the preface to his own translation of Zarathustra in The Portable Nietzsche (1954), Walter Kaufmann wrote: "Nietzsche's fate in the English-speaking world has been rather unkind, in spite of, or perhaps even in some measure because of, the ebullient enthusiasm of some of the early English and American Nietzscheans.... And when we look back today, one of the main reasons must be sought in the inadequacies of some of the early translations, particularly of Zarathustra. For one thing, they completely misrepresent the mood of the original--beginning, but unfortunately not ending, with their "thou" and "ye" with the clumsy attendant verb forms, and their whole misguided effort to approximate the King James Bible. As if Zarathustra's attacks on the spirit of gravity and his praise of "light feet" were not among the leitmotifs of the book! In fact, this alone makes [Thus Spoke Zarathustra] bearable! To be sure [i.e., surely], Zarathustra abounds in allusions to the Bible, most of them highly irreverent, but just these have been missed for the most part by Thomas Common."Of course, it is Common's translation I am reviewing.The Introduction to this book by Nietzsche's sister is pure fiction. She married a virulet antisemite and became a supporter of the Nazi's. Nietzsche was disgusted by her antisemitism and wanted nothing to do with her. They were estranged, and her claims that he dreamt of Zarathustra as a child are pure hogwash.In his book titled Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950), Walter Kaufmann demolished the antisemitic and proto-Nazi image of Nietzsche that Nietzsche's primitive sister had created by altering what Nietzsche had written. Antichrist in the title of Kaufmann's book is a reference to Nietzsche's book, The Antichrist. Nietzsche's meaning was " anti-Christian, " specificly with regard to the stifling Victorian Christianity of his contemporaries. It was certainly not intended to mean "Satan."As Kaufmann notes in his own Editor's Preface to his translation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in The Portable Nietzsche ( 1954):"We might wish that [Nietzsche] had taken out his histrionics on [someone other than the reader] and spared us some of the melodrama in Zarathustra. In places, of course, the writing is superb and only a pedant could prefer a drabber style. But often painfully adolescent emotions distract our attention from ideas that we cannot dismiss as immature at all. For that matter, adolescence [I interpret that as "adolescent emotions and behavior" during childhood] is not simply immaturity; it also marks a breakdown of communication, a failure in human relations, and generally the first deep taste of solitude. And what we find again and again in Zarathustra are the typical emotions with which a boy tries to compensate himself. "If you want to read translations that do not grossly misrepresent Nietzsche's views, avoid the English translations published before 1950. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale are the best translators of Nietzsche whom I am familiar with. Perhaps other more recent and reliable translations have also been published.Frankly, I have no idea why Nietzsche is regarded as a philosopher. He comes across as a ridiculously overconfident dabbler in psychology and sociology, relying on his own supposed genius to pass judgment on topics he knows almost nothing about (e.g., his ludicrous generalizations about Buddhism as a degenerate form of asceticism, unaware that Buddhism rejected extreme ascetic practices; that is just one of hundreds of examples).

This is philosophy? Sounds more like hatred and intolerance, or at least lack of empathy (often defined as sociopathic), to me.