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.