The book's title, in the original German and in translation, uses a phrase that was well known at the time in many European cultures and had specific meaning.
One of its earliest literary uses is in Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel ("gai sçavoir"). It was derived from a Provençal expression (gai saber) for the technical skill required for poetry-writing. Johann Gottfried Herder elaborated on this in letters 85, 90, and 102 (1796) of his Letters for the Advancement of Humanity. The expression proved durable and was used as late as 19th-century American English by Ralph Waldo Emerson and E. S. Dallas. It was also used in deliberately inverted form, by Thomas Carlyle in "the dismal science", to criticize the emerging discipline of economics by comparison with poetry.
The book's title was first translated into English as The Joyful Wisdom, but The Gay Science has become the common translation since Walter Kaufmann's version in the 1960s. Kaufmann cites The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1955) that lists "The gay science (Provençal gai saber): the art of poetry."
In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche refers to the poems in the Appendix of The Gay Science, saying they were
... written for the most part in Sicily, are quite emphatically reminiscent of the Provençal concept of gaia scienza—that unity of singer, knight, and free spirit which distinguishes the wonderful early culture of the Provençals from all equivocal cultures. The very last poem above all, "To the Mistral", an exuberant dancing song in which, if I may say so, one dances right over morality, is a perfect Provençalism.
This alludes to the birth of modern European poetry that occurred in Provence around the 11th century, whereupon, after the culture of the troubadours fell into almost complete desolation and destruction due to the Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229), other poets in the 14th century ameliorated and thus cultivated the gai saber or gaia scienza. In a similar vein, in Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche observed that,
... love as passion—which is our European speciality—[was invented by] the Provençal knight-poets, those magnificent and inventive human beings of the "gai saber" to whom Europe owes so many things and almost owes itself.[1]
The original English translation as Joyful Wisdom is more comprehensible to the modern reader given the contrasting modern English meanings of "gay" and "science". The German fröhlich can be translated "happy" or "joyful", cognate to the original meanings of "gay" in English and other languages. However Wissenschaft is not "wisdom" (wisdom = Weisheit), but a propensity toward any rigorous practice of a poised, controlled, and disciplined quest for knowledge. The common English translation “science" is misleading if it suggests natural sciences — clearly inappropriate in this case, where “scholarship” is preferable, implying humanities.
