A Play for Everyone and Nobody

Requiem Aeternam Deo

by Fulya Peker

Based on Graham Parkes’ Translation of
Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Permission for usage granted by the translator and thanks to Oxford University Press.

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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, April 2008. Copyright © 2006 Fulya Peker. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.

Page I

Introduction

by Mark Daniel Cohen

At the far end of the archetypal masque, where it joins the auto, we reach the point indicated by Nietzsche as the point of the birth of tragedy, where the revel of satyrs impinges on the appearance of a commanding god, and Dionysos is brought into line with Apollo. We may call this fourth cardinal point of drama the epiphany, the dramatic apocalypse or separation of the divine and the demonic, a point directly opposite the mime, which presents the simply human mixture. This point is the dramatic form of the point of epiphany . . .
—Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism

In art, there is a hierarchy of forms. There is a ranking of the manners of the imaginative comprehension, a structure to the structures of the mind. There are degrees to the formulations of the power of insight. This is inevitably so for there are no equivalents, no principles for equalizing alignments across the phase shifts that distinguish formal artistic modes. It as well goes without saying that nothing can guarantee the stability of ordering—the judgment of worth is dependent upon the need and warrants only a guarantee against circularity, but everything is conditional upon some assumed requirement, upon something without argument or proof, and such foundations shift with the sands.

However, from the standpoint of a given artistic objective, and in particular from that of a specific conception of the nature of insight itself, there are inescapably apparent fixities. To cast the gaze beyond the social, to look to the human predicament, to the conditions and exigencies that confront the individual purely for his criminality of being alive, there are forms of the endeavor that focus and better direct the incisive attention, that more profitably drive the beckoned thought. To commit the vertical delve, rather than the lateral inquiry along the swelling masses of a possibly soon to be extinct species, we are best served by art forms that seem intrinsic to the dark night of isolated contemplation, to the personal and lonely inquisition, to the moment of individual realization—to the seeking of the epiphany.

Drawing, the lyric poem, the drama as distinct from the narrative—these are among the art forms innate to the ruminations in the dimming. They are the manners most immediately and naturally at hand to those who seek answers in the night, in the absence of and distance from the communal distractions. They are innately tuned to bring the voice from afar, to dismiss the comforting delusions of the conventionally human.

And so there is a penetrating wisdom, a decorum of judgment, in the decision of Fulya Peker to transform Also Sprach Zarathustra into a drama for the stage. Beyond the obvious—the recommended artistic choice of Greek tragedy as the heightened form, the drama of characters with comet’s tails trailing into enigmatic depths, a call not to be forgotten even once Nietzsche shifted his focal length with Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft to isolate the human comedy and blur the tragic out of his field of vision, for the mystery of it all is never to be laid aside—there is the subtle: the aptness of the means she chose to adopt, given the artistic need of the enterprise.

It can be argued, and so I would argue it, that Die Geburt der Tragödie faltered because Nietzsche attempted to write two books at once: a philological work of sober scholarly credibility and—the matter clearly of greater interest to him and the residence of the greater virtues of the work—an explosion of oracular utterance. It is only the second that succeeds, and it does so magnificently, sufficiently to resound throughout the last and triumphant phase of his career, which despite all his attempts at good attitude remains tragic to its core. And it can be argued, and so I would argue it, that Zarathustra is a version of the work that Die Geburt der Tragödie should have been purified to be. In Nietzsche’s own characterization, Zarathustra is, in a sense, Die Geburt der Tragödie—sung: the initiating impulse, kept pure, transformed into art.

As an oracular work, a work of spontaneous revelation into secret recesses of knowledge, the impulses of which are accompanied by no reasoning or justification and are measured in worth not by their derivation but by their application, by the insight they prevail, Zarathustra is intrinsically a lyrical work—a poetic work in the sense of poetry as the most personal and profound confession of deep suspicions. Regardless of its expressed form, there is a poetic thought infusing it, a lyric rhythm of inference, an associative pulse of one thing leading to another, of implication that comes not of argumentation but of felt recognition.

Just as the semantic rhythm is the initiative of prose, and as the metrical rhythm is the initiative of epos, so the oracular rhythm seems to be the predominating initiative of lyric.

And so the apposite thought to transform Zarathustra into a drama—for as intrinsically a work of lyricism, of the harmonies of the spontaneous eruption of insight, so too it is native to the forms of similar aptitude. Zarathustra is inherently a conception of drama, for the lyrical imagination and drama are of a piece, both are automatic outgrowths of and voices for the epiphanic.

. . . the oracular associative process that we identified as one of the initiatives of lyric, and which corresponds to what we called the epiphany in drama.

The choice of drama over narrative necessarily compels a foreshortening of events, but that can be of no sensible concern, for the purpose of the functional unity of time and place intrinsic to the drama—regardless of the fictional “telling,” the events evidently take place in the theatre, under the focused ring of attention of the chorus that has become the audience, and in the time span in which the performance occurs—is not catharsis. It is the maintenance of tension, and a clean arc—a simple, single form (but then, all forms are single) of grip, crescendo, and release, uninterrupted by the distracting slippages of narrative refocusings of presumed time and place.

More to the purpose, as Peker evidently knows well, the transposition to drama is not an explication but a translation, and translations are reconceptualizations of the original works. (The more conventional idea of a translation is a concept without a definition. What readers normally expect when taking up a translation surpasseth understanding.) That Peker has, of necessity, escaped fidelity to the full roster of events and speeches in the original is no matter. Her purpose has been, and should have been, to obtain the point of the original, employing all the capabilities of her craft to re-render the point of the original for the theatre. Readers who want to know the details of Zarathustra as Nietzsche wrote it have no business here; they must learn German and read the book. Failing the will to do that, no one can help them.

More to the purpose still, Peker’s judgment in the selection of details to draw from the original is impeccable. She has reconceived and in reconceiving retained the tonalities of the original as well as the dramatic arc that exists in Nietzsche’s text, which is in many senses the most significant “image” in the original work, subtending the narrative flow and unifying the abundance of events and ultimate superfluity of speeches. (The most significant narrative plots always have, at their core, simple dramatic structures that are as much images of the meanings of the works as are any of the surface literary flourishes—in other words, plots are metaphors, if they are any good.) Most important, she has retained the original’s careful balance of oracular vision and self-deflating humor, a complex tonality that reinvokes the impinging of the revel of the satyrs on the emergence of the mysterious revelation, closing the circle and returning us to “the point of the birth of tragedy”—the only point at which any Nietzschean drama can be complete.

It is an honor for Hyperion to publish the first act of Fulya Peker’s Requiem Aeternam Deo—an effort in its small way reflective of the honor she has done Nietzsche’s text with the creation of her work: the true purpose of a translation. The editors hope our gesture will promote further productions of her drama and help to create the possibility of more audiences having the chance of judging her creation, for judgment is how we all do honor to art—by wrestling with it, by grappling ourselves to it, not by interpreting it but by fighting to understand what is ultimately a work of the imagination that resists understanding, that does not bow or pander to its recipients but demands of them the most thorough increments of intimate engagement. This, too, is something Peker has accomplished—the achievement of a work, like its original model, that is hermetic in every best sense.

Please do yourselves the honor of reading the following portion of Requiem Aeternam Deo.

The lyric is the genre in which the poet, like the ironic writer, turns his back on the audience.

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