The Gay Science
(“la gaya scienza”)

The Dawn is a Yes-saying book, deep but bright and gracious. The same is true also and in the highest degree of the gaya scienza: in almost every sentence profundity and high spirits go tenderly hand in hand. Some verses that express my gratitude for the most wonderful month of January I ever experienced—this whole book was its present—reveals sufficiently from what depths this “science” emerged to gaiety:

With a flaming spear you parted
All its ice until my soul
Hurries roaring toward the ocean
Of its highest hope and goal:

Ever healthier and brighter,
In most loving constraint, free—
Thus it praises your great wonders,
Fairest month of January!¹

What is here called “highest hope”—who could have any doubt about that when he sees the diamond beauty of the first words of Zarathustra flashing at the end of the fourth book?—Or when at the end of the third book he reads the granite words in which a destiny finds for the first time a formula for itself, for all time?²

The “Songs of Prince Free-as-a-Bird,”³ written for the most part in Sicily, are quite emphatically reminiscent of the Provençal concept of gaya scienza—that unity of singer, knight, and free spirit which distinguishes the wonderful early culture of the Provençals from all equivocal cultures. The very last poem above all, “To the Mistral,”⁴ an exuberant dancing song in which, if I may say so, one dances right over morality, is a perfect Provençalism.

¹Der du mit dem Flammenspeere
Meiner Seele Eis zerteilt,
Dass sie brausend nun zum Meere
Ihrer höchsten Hoffnung eilt:
Heller stets und stets gesunder,
Frei im liebevollsten Muss—
Also preist sie deine Wunder,
Schönster Januarius!

²The last three aphorisms of Book III, numbered 273-75, are included in this volume.

³An appendix of poems, added along with Book V (sections 343-83) to the second edition, in 1887. Vogelfrei, rendered literally above, also means: declared an outlaw whom anybody may shoot at sight.

⁴This poem is included in my Twenty German Poets: A Bilingual Edition (New York, Modern Library, 1963).