I suspect this is going to send me down a rabbit hole. oh well! read bc going to the symphony to see the Wagner and thought it would be fun to have some more context for the source material (as it were)

my pithy interpretative review is something like: Kerouac meets Tim Ferris? And I am interested to see if I stand by that after I read up a bit more on mr friedrich

I liked Walter Kaufman's notes in this version - they added to my experience. can't exactly rate the translation without being fluent in German so won't opine on that, tho Walt makes a pretty good case for himself being an improvement on translator Common.

As a story... interesting enough? (Another recurring thought I had, she-who-must-not-be-named gave me a tiny bit of knowledge around Balzac and sanctimonious novels in the one Galbraith book with the author - the fucked up Pilgrims progress. that seemed to be interspersed/flipped in this. zarathustra goes between meeting people and talking to them, and then retreating into his solitude)

As a philosophy - I do think I can see the influence Nietzsche has had on our modern society after reading this. I, at least, took from this that he believed pretty firmly that the solitary man would be the one who could "ascend". But I think our would-be overmen have definitely missed the parts about creation for creation's sake, the necessity of humour including the ability to laugh at oneself, and the necessity of joy. I'm also pretty sure that he's trying to advise that evilness is required insofar as it allows one to detach from the world and focus on one's important personal pursuits instead of adhering to a society's given value of virtue - not taking that lack of care and then using it to justify subjugating others. Zarathustra is actually pretty vehemently opposed to being a leader of men.

and of course, as Kaufman notes "his remarks about women are surely, more often than not, second-hand and third-rate"