What is most difficult to render from one language into another is the tempo of its style, which has its basis in the character of the race, or to speak more physiologically, in the average tempo of the assimilation of its nutriment. There are honestly meant translations, which, as involuntary vulgarisations, are almost falsifications of the original, merely ^because its lively and merry tempo (which overleaps and ob-dates all dangers in word and expression) could not also be 'rendered. A German is almost incapacitated for presto in ^his language; consequently also, as may be reasonably inferred, for many of the most delightful and daring nuances 3f free, free-spirited thought. And just as the buffoon and ityr are foreign to him in body and conscience, so Aristo- * Like the river Ganges: presto fLike the tortoise: lento. ^Like the frog: staccato. phanes and Petronius are untranslatable for him. Everything ponderous, viscous, and pompously clumsy, all long-winded and wearying species of style, are developed in profuse variety among Germans—pardon me for stating the fact that even Goethe's prose, in its mixture of stiffness and elegance, is no exception, as a reflection of the "good old time" to which it belongs, and as an expression of German taste at a time when there was still a "German taste," which was a rococo-taste in moribus et artibus. Lessing is an exception, owing to his histrionic nature, which understood much, and was versed in many things; he who was not the translator of Bayle to no purpose, who took refuge willingly in the shadow of Diderot and Voltaire, and still more willingly among the Roman comedy-writers—Lessing
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900; Zimmern, Helen, 1846-1934, tr. Beyond good and evil (Kindle Locations 622-636). New York : Modern Library publishers.
