The editor begs to state that, contrary to his announcement in
the Editorial Note to _The Joyful Wisdom,_ in which he declared
his intention of publishing all of Nietzsche's poetry, he has
nevertheless withheld certain less important verses from publication.
This alteration in his plans is due to his belief that it is an
injustice and an indiscretion on the part of posterity to surprise an
author, as it were, in his _négligé,_ or, in plain English, "in his
shirt-sleeves." Authors generally are very sensitive on this point, and
rightly so: a visit behind the scenes is not precisely to the advantage
of the theatre, and even finished pictures not yet framed are not
readily shown by the careful artist. As the German edition, however,
contains nearly all that Nietzsche left behind, either in small
notebooks or on scraps of paper, the editor could not well suppress
everything that was not prepared for publication by Nietzsche himself,
more particularly as some of the verses are really very remarkable.
He has, therefore, made a very plentiful selection from the _Songs
and Epigrams,_ nearly all of which are to be found translated here,
and from the Fragments of the Dionysus Dithyrambs, of which over half
have been given. All the complete Dionysus Dithyrambs appear in this
volume, save those which are duplicates of verses already translated
in the Fourth Part of _Zarathustra._ These Dionysus Dithyrambs were
prepared ready for press by Nietzsche himself. He wrote the final
manuscript during the summer of 1888 in Sils Maria; their actual
composition, however, belongs to an earlier date.
All the verses, unless otherwise stated, have been translated by Mr.
Paul Victor Cohn.