only a few more months until Zapffe's existentialist, anti-natalist 'On the Tragic' (1941) is finally published in English

Hey, that's great news. Do you know who's translating it and where to follow the progress?

As for the "The View from Mount Zapffe" - his philosophy was way ahead of its time. It took roughly 40 years for Becker to catch up with "Denial of Death", so it's fair to say he laid the foundation of terror management theory. Hell, he even introduced the depressive realism hypothesis in the 30s. (See e.g. The Last Messiah)

In depressive states, the mind may be seen in the image of such an antler, in all its fantastic splendour pinning its bearer to the ground.

Depression, ‘fear of life,’ refusal of nourishment and so on are invariably taken as signs of a pathological state and treated thereafter. Often, however, such phenomena are messages from a deeper, more immediate sense of life, bitter fruits of a geniality of thought or feeling at the root of antibiological tendencies.

When a human being takes his life in depression, this is a natural death of spiritual causes. The modern barbarity of ‘saving’ the suicidal is based on a hairraising misapprehension of the nature of existence.