Nietzsche’s Aesthetic Epistemology of Translation

In this paper, I examine Nietzsche’s reflections on translation. I begin with a brief analysis of two key aphorisms in which Nietzsche explicitly addresses the concept of translation: aphorism 83 of The Gay Science and aphorism 28 of Beyond Good and Evil. In these texts, translation primarily appears as the act of converting meaning from one language to another. However, the main aim of this paper is to move beyond these two aphorisms by considering Nietzsche’s essay On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense as a potential draft for a broader Nietzschean philosophy of translation. My thesis is that Nietzsche offers an epistemological approach to translation understood as an aesthetic relationship with the world. Thus, what is at stake is a specific concept of translation that cannot be totally separated from translation as movement between languages.