Robert Peters wrote:

>...  As a German and teacher of German I have to correct this.
>The word order of the sentence makes definitely clear that there is only
>one translation: The German even thinks of God as a singer of songs.  If
>the sentence was thought to mean something different the word order would
>be different, too, e.g.  Der Deutsche, liedersingend, denkt sich selbst
>Gott or Der Deutsche denkt sich liedersingend selbst Gott.  (the second
>version could be ambivalent).  No German writer (and surely not Nietzsche,
>this big boss of writers) would put the word "liedersingend" at the end
>to express "The German thinks of himself as a god when he sings songs".
>It would be simply wrong and sounds like a beginner in style wrote the
>sentence.  No, Walter's (and Matts') translation is a mistake - but an
>interesting one.

Accepting Robert's final acknowledgment as a form of faint praise, I must
nevertheless dispute his disagreement, w/ all respect.

I am no longer a German and certainly no teacher of German, simply one
who has spoken the language with educated people for close to seven decades
and believes he has some sensitivity to poetic license and, perhaps more
appropriately here, to the use of word order for rhetorical effect, as
I have no doubt Robert has as well.  The two alternative German versions
which he suggests for my English translation actually sound quite awkward,
lacking the easy flow of a weak iambic pentameter line that Nietzsche's
actual words have.

Admittedly, the fact that a sentence scans smoothly, does not establish
the validity of one translation over another, where both seem correct.
The ambivalence may be due to the use of the word "selbst" which can mean
"self" or "even", like the French "meme" (w/ an accent over the first "e").
It can make the sentence mean that the German thinks God himself a singer
of songs, or, in the same vein, that the German thinks even God a singer
of songs.  Perhaps an "auch" (also) could have been inserted:  Der Deutsche
denkt sich selbst auch Gott liedersingend (The German considers God also
to be a singer of songs.) where the "selbst" refers back to the sentence's
subject, so that "denkt sich selbst" can mean "thinks to himself" and the
ambiguity would have gone away, assuming there to be only one God, a
reasonable assumption in a book about the twilight of the idols.

While I don't dispute the Kaufman/Peters translation I take issue w/ mine
being characterized as wrong.  Perhaps the ambiguity is not really an
ambiguity but a deliberate double meaning.

Walter Meyer