La Gaviota (English Edition): I am honored with your permission to dedicate to you this translation of the best novel in the Spanish language. This honor I can well appreciate

In rendering into English the ballads and other poetry, so profusely interspersed throughout this novel, I had to decide between the preservation of the original thoughts and ideas, in all their quaintness and integrity, and wrest from my translation that poetic elegance which, as English poetry, I could have wished to have clothed it in; or to abandon all the original, save the mere text, and write independent stanzas in English, as though I had composed original poetry, borrowing only the thought from the Spanish text. My habitual desire, in all my translations