I am writing these lines, to-day the 6th of June, 1924, in this island
of Fuerteventura, an island that is propitious to calm thinking and to
a laying bare of the soul, even as this parched land is bare, bare even
to the bone. Here I have been confined now for nearly three months, no
reason for my confinement having been given other than the arbitrary
mandate of the military power that is de-civilizing and debasing my
native country.
Hither came my friend Mr. J. E. Crawford Flitch to bear me company.
He was entrusted by Mr. Alfred A. Knopf with the task of making an
anthology or _florilegium_ of my shorter articles and extracts from my
more extensive writings which should present a conspectus of my whole
literary work. It is he, my friend and translator, who is responsible
for the selection of the pieces which form this anthology.
I am in principle an enemy of all such selections or anthologies of
an author’s works, and the more so when the author’s influence is
due primarily not so much to his ideas as to the passionate tone
and gesture with which he expresses them, to his style. This work
of selection appears to me to be as difficult as would be that of
abridging a sonata or a picture. And what appears to me almost
impossible is that the author himself should make the selection. It is
not possible for us to see ourselves from the outside, to become part
of our public.
In any case, a work like this is a kind of index or catalogue, and
its chief utility is to incite in the public a desire to get to know
the author better. It is, to put it bluntly, in the nature of an
advertisement.
Collections of selected writings are most valuable when the chief
importance of an author lies in his ideology, which may or may not be
welded into a system; they are less valuable when he is distinguished
not so much by his ideas as by the warm images which incarnate them. It
is relatively easy to give a summary of an author when we are asked:
“What does he say?” but not so easy when the question to be answered
is: “How does he say it?” That is to say, it is possible to abridge a
philosophic system, but not a poem. In the poem, that which we call the
argument is the most external element of its form, and its essence, the
essence of the poem, is the rhythm, the aroma of the words, the style.
Rhythm may give birth to argument or subject, but subject does not
always give birth to rhythm.
In selecting these pieces--torsos, arms and heads of statuary--my
friend the translator has been guided by an artistic rather than by
a philosophical or ideological criterion, and for this I am grateful
to him. And when I say that I am grateful to him, I mean that in this
way he has best served the public that seeks to know me--me, the man,
and not a system, for I have no system. Like Walt Whitman I would
say of each one of my works: “This is not a book, it is a man.” It
is comparatively easy, for example, to synthetize the philosophical
system of Descartes, or that of Kant, or that of Hegel, or that of
Comte, or, still more so, that of Spencer; but it is not easy to
synthetize Goethe or Nietzsche, in both of whom is a latent philosophy.
And still less so to synthetize Dante, Milton, Cervantes, Shakespeare.
And it has not been the object of my translator to present a summary of
an ideology but to give an impression of a spirit.
To elucidate this point still further would lead us into an intricate
examination of the relations which subsist between a man and his work,
and to inquire whether the man makes the work or the work makes the man
or whether each makes the other at the same time. The man makes himself
in making his work and the work makes itself in making the man. The
Creation makes God the Creator, and God the Creator makes the Creation,
the Universe.
* * * * *
Strictly speaking, is not every translation in effect a new and
original work? In being turned into English, however faithful the
translator may be, shall I not say something different from what I
have said in Spanish? Does a song say the same when played on the
violin, the flute, the harp, the bassoon? Is a sonata the same when
played on the piano and the organ? I know that when I have read my
writings translated into another language I have been aware of echoes
and reverberations which lay sleeping in the depths of my spirit, I
have glimpsed horizons which the firm and severe contours of my native
tongue did not permit me to see. And I have sometimes thought of
making a new work based upon a retranslation of the translation.
Among these essays is one upon the religion of Quixotism. Hitherto I
have been meditating and perhaps dogmatizing upon this religion--now
I am living it. For it is here, where the waves murmur tidings of
my native shores, the mountainous coast of the wild Bay of Biscay,
it is here that I have felt most deeply all the melancholy grandeur
of the ridiculous passion of the Knight of the impossible Chimera.
While the cowardly comic-opera tyrants who have banished me here are
dishonouring our Spain, her whom they call their mother, I am exalting
and eternalizing her, and I call her my daughter.
There is a famous Spanish couplet which says that there is no handful
of earth without a Spanish grave--
_No hay un puñado de tierra_
_Sin una tumba española,_
and it would seem that these unhappy rulers wish to extend the national
graveyard. And I propose that there shall be no corner of heaven
without a nest of Spanish thought.
Nests of Spanish thought are the pieces which compose this book.
* * * * *
And now I return to contemplate the sea, to feed my spirit upon it, to
watch its white-crested waves which are born and die and succeed one
another like the generations of men and of men’s works in the sea of
history. I return to contemplate the all-consoling sea which smiles,
with its superhuman smile, upon our tragic human frailties.
Greeting! my readers of the English-speaking world. And when, having
read this book, you wish me farewell, may you carry with you something
of the quixotesque passion which I have put into my work and which is
the life of my life.