I intended at first to write a short Prologue to this English
translation of my _Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida_, which has been
undertaken by my friend Mr. J.E. Crawford Flitch. But upon further
consideration I have abandoned the idea, for I reflected that after all
I wrote this book not for Spaniards only, but for all civilized and
Christian men--Christian in particular, whether consciously so or
not--of whatever country they may be.
Furthermore, if I were to set about writing an Introduction in the light
of all that we see and feel now, after the Great War, and, still more,
of what we foresee and forefeel, I should be led into writing yet
another book. And that is a thing to be done with deliberation and only
after having better digested this terrible peace, which is nothing else
but the war's painful convalescence.
As for many years my spirit has been nourished upon the very core of
English literature--evidence of which the reader may discover in the
following pages--the translator, in putting my _Sentimiento Trágico_
into English, has merely converted not a few of the thoughts and
feelings therein expressed back into their original form of expression.
Or retranslated them, perhaps. Whereby they emerge other than they
originally were, for an idea does not pass from one language to another
without change.
The fact that this English translation has been carefully revised here,
in my house in this ancient city of Salamanca, by the translator and
myself, implies not merely some guarantee of exactitude, but also
something more--namely, a correction, in certain respects, of the
original.
The truth is that, being an incorrigible Spaniard, I am naturally given
to a kind of extemporization and to neglectfulness of a filed niceness
in my works. For this reason my original work--and likewise the Italian
and French translations of it--issued from the press with a certain
number of errors, obscurities, and faulty references. The labour which
my friend Mr. J.E. Crawford Flitch fortunately imposed upon me in making
me revise his translation obliged me to correct these errors, to clarify
some obscurities, and to give greater exactitude to certain quotations
from foreign writers. Hence this English translation of my _Sentimiento
Trágico_ presents in some ways a more purged and correct text than that
of the original Spanish. This perhaps compensates for what it may lose
in the spontaneity of my Spanish thought, which at times, I believe, is
scarcely translatable.
It would advantage me greatly if this translation, in opening up to me a
public of English-speaking readers, should some day lead to my writing
something addressed to and concerned with this public. For just as a new
friend enriches our spirit, not so much by what he gives us of himself,
as by what he causes us to discover in our own selves, something which,
if we had never known him, would have lain in us undeveloped, so it is
with a new public. Perhaps there may be regions in my own Spanish
spirit--my Basque spirit, and therefore doubly Spanish--unexplored by
myself, some corner hitherto uncultivated, which I should have to
cultivate in order to offer the flowers and fruits of it to the peoples
of English speech.
And now, no more.
God give my English readers that inextinguishable thirst for truth which
I desire for myself.