THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA

A new translation of this seminal work by the prize-winning translator of W.G. Sebald, Goethe, Rilke, Herta Müller and Elfriede Jelinek.

In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche's infamous protagonist sets off on a grand and noble quest to find meaning in a secular world and to live joyfully alongside the knowledge of death. In this new translation by Michael Hulse – the first in English by a poet – Zarathustra is revealed in all his bold and ironic splendour as a man who prizes self worth above all else as a moral code to live by. Radical, uncategorisable, contradictory and often humorous, Thus Spake Zarathustra is a grand celebration of human existence by one of the most influential thinkers of the past two centuries.



Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 in Röcken (Saxony), Germany. He studied classical philology at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig and in 1869 was appointed to the chair of classical philology at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Ill health led him to resign his professorship ten years later. His works include The Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, The Case of Wagner, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Nietzsche contra Wagner and Ecce Homo. Thus Spake Zarathustra, a work of philosophical fiction, was written in four parts and published in German between 1883 and 1885 as Also sprach Zarathustra. The work is incomplete, according to Nietzsche's original plan, but it is the first thorough statement of Nietzsche's mature philosophy and the masterpiece of his career. It received little attention during his lifetime, but its influence since his death has been considerable in the arts as well as philosophy. Nietzsche died in 1900.