No. Your posts are incoherent, because you have no idea how language works and changes, you are confusing e.g. a preposition with an infinitive. That is absolutely ridiculous.
The source language is German, and the German philologist Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche meant two nouns and a preposition between them: “Wille zur Macht” - not “Wille Macht zu haben” (“zu haben” <=> “to have”) - both are possible in German (and b.t.w.: in English too), one with a following noun and one with a following verb; and Nietzsche decided to write “Wille zur Macht”, because he had the will to do that, and it was no problem, because it does not violate the German language.
The rules and the exceptions are the same in German and English. The term “will to power” is accepted in English.
P.S.: I am still waiting for your “translations”, Ornello.
The source language syntax has nothing to do with that of the target language. Nothing! If you are a native speaker I am not surprised that you want to distort the English to conform to the German. This is typical of Germans, and part of the reason that one should never translate into a foreign language. One must always translate into one’s native tongue. No exceptions! The native speaker is always right. ALWAYS!!!
Worthy of note that “will to” + noun can be used in English when the noun is the noun for of an adjective. As von rivers indicated, not a person or a place or a thing, but a noun that indicates a state. Like saying “ice is solid”.
will to power - will to be powerful
will to beauty - will to be beautiful
will to wisdom - will to be wise
So it isn’t used for just any noun like “will to cheese and crackers”, which indeed does not make sense, though that sounds pretty good right about now.
Whether or not N meant to be powerful, to wish to be powerful, to exercise power, to feel power, that I do not know.
This may be correct in general, but we’re talking about a highly specific use of the word Wille, in a key philosophical term. You have yet to show any understanding of Nietzsche’s philosophy.
True.
The collocation must, yes. But what if we made a new combination: not of the noun “will” followed by the particle “to”, but of the noun “will” followed by the preposition “to”? Then it need not, and indeed cannot, be followed by a verb.
There is no such construction and you cannot just create it. ‘Will to’ is used only with the ‘to’ as part of an infinitive. I have translated four of Nietzsche’s books, including Der Wille zur Macht.
Don’t forget the usage of zu as ‘on’, as in the title Zur Genealogie der Moral.
“The” native speaker? As if native speakers of the same language always agree! (In fact, I’ve often found that non-native speakers speak the language more properly than many natives, because they care about it more.) Your utterances are becoming increasingly more absurd.
As I’ve pointed out, this hasn’t been true for more than a century, and even if it had been, do you think Shakespeare would care if there was no such construction? You’re just a linguistic conservative.
No, it is true. This is a mistake that has been overlooked. Many philosophy professors and other academics are idiots. They see Wille and think it must be ‘will’. They see zur and think it must be ‘to’. Neither is true.
Excuse me, but you really have absolutely no idea. Now you are even confusing syntax with grammar and word history. Nobody was talking about syntax, because the example we are talking about has nearly nothing to do with syntax. Obviously you do also not know what syntax is.
All humans who are capable of speaking are native speakers.
You have an excuse for everything, Ornello. This time it is the scapegoat ideology again. You are wrong.
That is nonsense, Ornello. It matters which native speaker Nietzsche was, and Nietzsche was German, thus a German native speaker, and wrote in German as his native language. So German is the source language. The translation has to start with the source language. ALWAYS!!!
I can guarantee you that you are no professional translator.
Syntax is the structure of a language, word order, etc. Go back to school. I shan’t reply to any more of your inane posts. You haven’t the ghost of a notion whereof you speak. It does have to do with syntax, because ‘will to (noun)’ violates syntax! A verb is required after ‘to’! ‘To’ here is and can only be part of an infinitive!
Look here, to see the variety of translations of Wille:
There is an announcer in the background of this song, who says:
In den letzten Monaten ist die Zahl der vermissten Personen dramatisch angestiegen. Die jüngste Veröffentlichung der lokalen Polizeibehörde berichtet von einem weiteren tragischen Fall. Es handelt sich um ein neunzehnjähriges Mädchen, das zuletzt vor vierzehn Tagen gesehen wurde. Die Polizei schließt die Möglichkeit nicht aus, dass es sich hier um ein Verbrechen handelt.
My translation
“In recent months the number of missing persons has dramatically increased. Yet another tragic case has been reported by local police. It concerns a 19-year old girl who was last seen a fortnight ago. The police have not ruled out [the possibility of] foul play.”
Again: You do not read my posts carefully. I did not say that syntax had nothing to do with the structure of language. I said that syntax has nearly nothing to do with what we were talking about. You are confusing syntax with grammar. But grammar and syntax are not the same. Grammar is more than syntax, and syntax is more than morphology.
You have an excuse for everything, Ornello. You are wrong.
That’s just a somewhat free translation. Literally it means “Towards the Genealogy of Morals (or Morality, in the sense of “morals”, not “moralness”)”.
If the primary aim is to make the translation as proper an English text as possible, then I agree that the translator should probably be a native English-speaker. But a good translation is not just a proper native-language text, but also an accurate rendition of the original. If the latter were the primary aim, the translator should probably be a native speaker of the original language. But both aims are equally important to a good translation. Perhaps, then, the translator should be somewhere in the middle, bilingual for example–or from a nation situated (linguistically) in the middle…
I really wonder how you translate that first sentence of section 668, which most literally reads: “‘Willing’ is not ‘desiring’, striving, longing: therefrom it heaves itself off through the affect of the command.” (Even more literally would be “begreeding” instead of “desiring”, but that doesn’t exist.)
There is an announcer in the background of this song, who says:
In den letzten Monaten ist die Zahl der vermissten Personen dramatisch angestiegen. Die jüngste Veröffentlichung der lokalen Polizeibehörde berichtet von einem weiteren tragischen Fall. Es handelt sich um ein neunzehnjähriges Mädchen, das zuletzt vor vierzehn Tagen gesehen wurde. Die Polizei schließt die Möglichkeit nicht aus, dass es sich hier um ein Verbrechen handelt.
My translation
“In recent months the number of missing persons has dramatically increased. Yet another tragic case has been reported by local police. It concerns a 19-year old girl who was last seen a fortnight ago. The police have not ruled out [the possibility of] foul play.”
I already quoted the Kaufmann translation of that sentence to you on page 1 (hence the “that”). It’s section 668 of Der Wille zur Macht.
That convention is then somewhat liberal, which may be fine in most cases, but in the case of Nietzsche, who was a philologist, it’s probably not the best choice.
Though I agree with this statement, I don’t think we hold this opinion for the same reasons, and contest whether you hold it for the right ones.
“On” is even an explicitly bad, wrong translation; as “zu” (unambiguously meaning “to”, never “on”) clearly tells us that Nietzsche was not presenting us with such a genealogy, nor was able to present a discourse “on” it - he rather uncovers some means to the establishing of such a genealogy, and presents us with various introductions to the concept that morality has a genealogy.
The writings of the many morally fixed and entrenched Nietzscheans on the web could be seen as “on a genealogy” - that is to say, built on the assumption that such a genealogy has been unambiguously made explicit and certain, and is something one can discuss as a clear-cut object. This however speaks to ignorance of the sort of goal that Nietzsche’s strength could afford to project; to be the genesis of a new morality. This may very well be an intended higher meaning to the title of the book; and of course “on” is perfectly out of place in that case.
Nietzsche always writes in order to increase his own and his readers powers; certainly the construction of a genealogy of morals must be seen as an exercise of creative will, not in the last place a way to touch on and where necessary and possible overcome the history of morals in oneself, and derive morals directly from ones own capacities, ‘the quantum of power that one is’. Therefore, to take the genealogy (or the various subtly differing genealogies) of morals as suggested by Nietzsche’s work too literally is an act of cowardice.
Very concisely: “Zu” always denotes a movement, a becoming. “On” is rather akin to the word “meta”, it implies fixed concepts and objects.
