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. MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO. _Fuerteventura, June 6, 1924._ CONTENTS _Author’s Preface_ xii