ABSTRACT
I first met Parmenides — together with Anaximander, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, and the other great Presocratics — in a German translation by Wilhelm Nestle, famous as the editor of the later editions of Zeller's magnun opus. I was 15 or 16 years old, and I was overwhelmed by the meeting. Here were the first of the steps that led to Newton. The verses that I liked best were Parmenides' story of Selene's love for radiant Helios (DK 28 Bl4—15). But I did not like it that the translation made the Moon male and the Sun female (according to the genders of their German names), and it occurred to me to give the couplet in German a title like 'Moongoddess and Sungod', or perhaps 'Selene and Helios', in order to rectify the genders. So I began fiddling about with the translations. The volume, which I still possess, shows many traces of this.
