Superman

Tarzan wasn’t a ladies man.  He’d just come along and scoop ‘em up under his arm like that, quick as a cat in the jungle.

But Clark Kent, now there was a real gent.  He would not be caught sittin’ around in no junglescape, dumb as an ape, doin’ nothin’.

I picked up a used copy of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra at The Book Den in Santa Barbara before embarking on this ocean crossing.  Zarathustra had been on my mental reading list for years, as I have long been an admirer of Stanley Kubrick’s use of Richard Strauss’ symphonic adaptation in 2001: A Space Odyssey.  It was the work of Richard Tarnas, however, that finally convinced me to just go out and buy a copy of the book.  In his Cosmos and Psyche, Tarnas correlates recursive alignments of the outer planets—especially Jupiter and Uranus—with all three of these works in such a way that I was compelled to finally explore the ultimate source of so much of our popular culture, the Superman archetype in particular.

Superman never made any money for savin’ the world from Solomon Grundy, and sometimes I despair the world will never see another man like him.

The translation that I purchased is by Walter Kaufmann, Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University.  It’s not that I had some preference for Kaufmann’s translation of Nietzsche’s German; it was simply the only one they had in the store.  The fact that multiple translations are available raises one of the reasons I had put off reading Zarathustra for so long: I generally distrust translations.  Whenever I read something in translation I can’t help but wonder if that’s what the original really intended.  Having read several English translations of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, for example, I know there can be huge discrepancies from one to the next—some of which really suck.  The problem is, when you’re standing there in the bookstore, you don’t know what you’re getting; the blurb on the back cover always says this is the greatest piece of translation since King James.  So it was with some incredulity that I stood there in The Book Den and read how Newsweek had found Kaufmann’s translation of Nietzsche “dazzling,” commending his “incandescent splendor of the language.”  Since I cannot read Nietzsche in the original, Kauffman’s dazzling incandescence would have to suffice.

Hey, Bob.  Supe had a straight job even though he could’ve smashed through any bank in the United States—well, he had the strength—but he would not.

Folks said his family were all dead; the planet crumbled but, Superman, he forced himself to carry on, forget Krypton, and keep goin’.

I suspected the worst when, on my first day at sea, I opened Zarathustra and began reading the “Translator’s Notes.”  Kaufmann immediately defends his use of the word Overman in place of George Bernard Shaw’s Superman for Nietzsche’s Übermensch.  Was I really going to have to spend the next two weeks reading about Overman?  I mean, it just doesn’t resonate.  Conversely, I can see Kaufmann’s point: Nietzsche devotes a great deal of ink to contrasting “over” and “under”; and “sub” doesn’t usually work as the opposing prefix to “super.”  Similarly, when Nietzsche explains his own terminology (through Kaufmann, that is) he can say, “There it was too that I picked up the word ‘overman,’ by the way, and that man is something that must be overcome.”  It would be awkward (and probably incorrect) to translate this as “man is something that must be superseded.”  Surmounted might work as a synonym for overcome, but then you lose the wordplay on “super.”  I’ll admit it’s a challenge to faithfully capture an author’s intent in a tongue other than his own, maybe impossible.  That is why I generally distrust translations.

Superman never made any money for savin’ the world from Solomon Grundy, and sometimes I despair the world will never see another man like him.

Tarzan was King of the Jungle and Lord over all the apes, but he could hardly string together four words: “I Tarzan. You Jane.”

So for my money, Professor Kaufmann has nothing on the Irish playwright, whose ironic Superman has flown to archetype status in pop culture.  Superman inspires enduring adaptations, from comics to TV to the blockbuster film franchise, where Overman would be lucky to make it on Saturday morning cartoons—airing, no doubt, right after Underdog.  And ultimately, successive adaptations are precisely the point.  Kaufmann has Zarathustra as the teacher of the eternal recurrence, but we know better: he’s actually a professor of recursion.  He says, “I taught them to work on the future and to redeem with their creation all that has been.  To redeem what is past in man and to re-create all ‘it was’ until the will says, ‘Thus I willed it!  Thus I shall will it!’”

Sometimes when Supe was stoppin’ crimes, I’ll bet that he was tempted to just quit and turn his back on man, join Tarzan in the forest.

But he stayed in the city and kept on changin’ clothes in dirty, old phone booths ‘til his work was through, had nothin’ to do but go on home.

If Zarathustra were, in fact, the teacher of recurrence, our Superman would be stuck in an endless loop of repetition; the archetype would be static, unable to learn and evolve with the tenor of the times.  That is not the case.  The American Superman of the Cold War era had to constantly keep his super powers in check, disguising himself as a mild-mannered reporter, a dolt too insecure to ask even jittery Lois Lane for a date.  By the end of the 20th century, however, that Superman just wouldn’t fly.  We needed a Superman who could overcome his baser tendencies—insolence, ignorance, indolence, and entitlement—not conceal his higher self.  And now as never before we need a “new nobility,” a Superman powerful enough to redeem Zarathustra’s original spirit, protecting the treasures of civilization in preparation for the light of a new dawn across this benighted planet.  Lucky for us, Superman is out there now, working tirelessly and without compensation in what is arguably the greatest rock ballad of the post-Beatles era: “Superman’s Song” by Crash Test Dummies.

Superman never made any money for savin’ the world from Solomon Grundy, and sometimes I despair the world will never see another man like him.

And sometimes I despair the world will never see another man like him.

Most of the time, however, I remain confident that we will see another man like him, for thus we willed it.  Thus we shall will it!