The Gay Science href="http://articles.gourt.com/en/German language">German: Die fröhliche Wissenschaft ("la gaya scienza"), is a book written by Friedrich Nietzsche, first published in 1882 and followed by a second edition, which was published after the completion of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, in 1887. This substantial expansion includes a fifth book and an appendix of songs. It was noted by Nietzsche to be "the most personal of all my books". It contains the most poetry ever published by him.

Title and content

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The book's now seemingly strange title uses a phrase that was well-known at the time, deriving from a Provençal expression for the technical skill required for poetry-writing (this was long before the term "gay" acquired any association with homosexuality). It had already been used in inverted form by Thomas Carlyle (see dismal science). However, it was first translated into English as The Joyous Wisdom. Nevertheless The Gay Science has become the canonical translation of the title since Walter Kaufmann's version in the 1960's. Kaufmann references The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1955) that lists "The gay science (=Pr^* gai saber): the art of poetry."

Nietzsche himself comments in Ecce Homo about the poems in the Appendix, saying they were,

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", an exuberant dancing song in which, if I may say so, one dances right over morality, is a perfect Provençalism.

This alludes to the birth of modern European poetry that occurred in Provence around the 12th century, whereupon, after the culture of the troubadours fell into almost complete desolation and destruction due to the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229), other poets in the 14th century ameliorated and thus cultivated the gai saber or gaia scienza. In a similar vein, in Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche observed that,

love as passion—which is our European speciality—invented by the Provençal knight-poets, those magnificent and inventive human beings of the "gai saber" to whom Europe owes so many things and almost owes itself. (Section 260)

Another indicator of the deficiency of the original translation as The Joyous Wisdom is that the German Wissenschaft never indicates "wisdom", but a propensity toward any rigorous practice of a poised, controlled, and disciplined quest for knowledge, and is typically translated as "science".

The book is usually placed within Nietzsche's middle period, when his work extolled the merits of science, scepticism and intellectual discipline as routes to mental freedom. The affirmation of the Provencal tradition is also one of a joyful affirmation of life.

References

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• The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs by Friedrich Nietzsche; translated, with commentary, by Walter Kaufmann (Vintage Books, March 1974, ISBN 0394719859)

External links

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• Die fröhliche Wissenschaft

1882 books | Books by Friedrich Nietzsche

Die fröhliche Wissenschaft | Lõbus teadus (Nietzsche) | La gaya ciencia | Le Gai Savoir (Nietzsche) | המדע העליז | De vrolijke wetenschap | A Gaia Ciência