Ex oriente tenebrae!

Abstract

As general editor of the first Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche in English translation,1 Oscar Levy (1867–1946) played a vital part in the first wave of Nietzsche reception in England. Patrick Bridgwater argues: “rarely can a translation of a modern œuvre have exercised such powerful influence on so many important writers”.2 None of the translations in Levy’s English Nietzsche edition is by Levy himself (although he was translating two of Benjamin Disraeli’s novels into German at the same time);3 instead, in addition to negotiating the rights, corralling the translators and financing the edition, he proselytised for Nietzsche in his own writings through introductions and other essays. These certainly had the desired effect of winning readers for Nietzsche and raising awareness of the recently deceased German philosopher at an otherwise highly sensitive period of Anglo-German relations in the lead-up to the First World War. At the same time as Levy was promoting Nietzsche, though, he was not doing him any favours in the longer term by aligning him with various other causes which were dear to him personally, attaching Nietzsche’s name to his own dubious political programme. In this essay I want to examine Levy’s Nietzsche more closely by focussing on one of the less prominent – but none the less symptomatic – among his Nietzsche essays, his introduction to Nietzsche’s late autobiographical text Ecce homo.