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. MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO. SALAMANCA, _April, 1921._ * * * * * TRANSLATOR'S NOTE Footnotes added by the Translator, other than those which merely supplement references to writers or their works mentioned in the text, are distinguished by his initials. I THE MAN OF FLESH AND BONE _Homo sum; nihil humani a me alienum puto_, said the Latin playwright. And I would rather say, _Nullum hominem a me alienum puto_: I am a man; no other man do I deem a stranger. For to me the adjective _humanus_ is no less suspect than its abstract substantive _humanitas_, humanity. Neither "the human" nor "humanity," neither the simple adjective nor the substantivized adjective, but the concrete substantive--man. The man of flesh and bone; the man who is born, suffers, and dies--above all, who dies; the man who eats and drinks and plays and sleeps and thinks and wills; the man who is seen and heard; the brother, the real brother.