To fully appreciate this story it helps to know the outline of Zapffe's philosophy, which can be stated thus:

Like all living species, humans are endowed with a certain number of physiological and social needs; the need for food, rest, security and so on. These needs are quite easily satisfied. However, we humans have an additional need, lacking in all other species, for an overarching meaning of life. This need, according to Zapffe, can never be satisfied unless we deceive ourselves. We can thus either delude ourselves into belief in a false meaning of life, or we can remain honest and realise that life is meaningless. Unlike Sartre's existentialism, which was ultimately an optimistic doctrine, Zapffe's existential view was bleak. His great survey of tragedy in literature, politics and the arts indicated that all human endeavour was ultimately futile. He was a worthy heir to the great German pessimist Schopenhauer, and his view on the human destiny was simply that we ought to stop procreation immediately.

Here goes, for the first time in English, AFAIK (I adopted British spelling conventions for the occasion).

By Peter Wessel Zapffe, 1936

From the Norwegian by Sirocco

Berlin was in seething fever. And as the voice from Grosse Rundfunken collapsed upon the planet like a cloth, the peoples held their breath until the whole of earth, hirsute with humans, trembled in painfully tense expectation. Month after month the rumours had been swirling, at times met by disdainful snorts, at others, by exultation, at still others, by solemn silence. For this was something else and more than all the technical adventures that had so far come to life before people’s eyes; this was the epoch of the epochs, the leap and the metamorphosis, the most decisive crisis in the life of humanity, the realisation of its boldest dreams. And now it had actually happened; now it would no longer do to make a skeptical face; now it was a matter of historical fact!

On the Fourteenth of March Nineteenhundredandninetythree, Professor Amadeus Dreistein, the world-renowned astrophysicist and philosopher, accompanied by his loyal disciple, Dr. Viertelstein, began his journey to the planet Venus. At 21.51.33 ½ o’clock, a sky-threatening pillar of smoke arose from Tempelhofer Feld, followed by a million staring eyes all unable to believe themselves. On its top rode a rocket on which Dreistein had been working for a lifetime – his own, not just anyone's - and baptised in champagne, ‘Flos Veneris’. Inside the rocket, suspended in clever anti-gravitational springs, were two men with less regard for their lives than for the ecstatic consummation of a thirty year long mass at the altar of science. The Argus eyes of telescopes traced them to the edge of emptiness, where they could no longer be distinguished from a mote on the lens.

When the estimated time expired, everyone on earth outside of camps and prisons went on lookout. Endless debates arose on the morning tram and swept around the globe like breaker waves. Had the rocket missed its target, to be consumed by infinity? Many still remembered the transmission from the moonbus ‘Hubris XV’, which in 1987 passed an Ameuropean astronaut; presumably one ejected during the collision of ‘Hubris II’ with the unmanned ‘Lunatic VIII’. In its obituary, Space Times had pointed out that this was the third of those austronauts who, after the big shipwrecks in the heavily polluted whirls of northern light, continue in orbit ‘on their own’. Dressed in their white spacesuits and lit by the set sun, they are, during interlunar periods, visible by ordinary telescope. Unfortunately they can only be identified by position, but their birth certificate names have been retained, and the Institute for Astrology, in cooperation with the Salvation Army, may on request provide their families with the azimuth at the next culmination.

This could have been the destiny of ‘R/K Flos Veneris’, but the heroic pioneers might also have been caught, slain and devoured by Venuvians. Or was one in store for a triumph to shake the Milky Way? At the least unusual noise, people would leave their desks and workshops and dash to the windows. Crowds, staring and clashing in midroad, behaved threateningly toward buses trying to pass. A state of emergency had to be declared in Berlin, but there were also grave effects elsewhere. In the South of Norway a cult arose which, in accordance with Malachi 4,5, believed that Eliah would join the return to appoint a date for the Day of Reckoning. The hopes invested in the expedition knew no bounds; unfathomable amounts of gems, gold, and radium would be anyone’s as soon as a permanent link was established. The Office of Migration spawned an interplanetary department and The Oslo Evening Gazette planned an ambulatory branch.

The 9th of September the following year, the bomb went off: ‘Flos Veneris’ had landed in the Mediterranean, the Professor being on his way to Berlin. As the morning papers came out on the 10th, the newsstands were rushed and paperboys all across Europe obliterated by the advance of their customers. Indeed, the stacks of the special edition might be so obnoxiously described as 'worth their weight in blood’. The editor of The Swedish Central Times, who had never, even in the heat of polemic, used a stronger word than ‘quite’, met his secretary with the following morning salutation: “Scimitars in my kidneys, lad, today we have one god-damned, storm-ridden, enormous-as-hell sensation!”

Dreistein and his heroic companion had discovered an extinct planet, its surface so shot through with architectonic filigree as to seem, from a distance, like a hovering bone-coloured lacework against the jet black sky. At landing the two scientists had just enough oxygen left four a half-hour stay outside the rocket. Singleminded as they were, they did not indulge in aimless sight-seeing as was certainly invited by the unutterably beautiful buildings, the strange contraptions of unknown purpose, and the grotesque wax-imbued figures of the crypts. Dreistein sought one matter only: archives and libraries. As the half-hour drew to a close and the quest remained unsuccessful, the Professor, with a heart as heavy as iridium, ordered the retreat.

Then it is that Dr. Viertelstein resolves to sacrifice his life. He shuts off his can of oxygen, and before the Professor can get a hold of the tap, his companion has unwrapped his Nirwana suit, whereupon he drops dead to the ground. Dreistein grasped the situation immediately. His assistant had donated his oxygen supply, not to him, but to Science. He was obliged to use it, and right away. And now the miracle occurs: the Professor makes his way to a vault full of steel cylinders with inscriptions. Semi-conscious and with waning powers, he pulls one of them back to the rocket, slots his respirator into the main supply – and sets course for 14 Unter den Linden.

To be continued.