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[0:00] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Hello and welcome to the Drama Book Show where we bring you conversations with writers, artists, and theater professionals whose work helps shape the world of live performance. My name is Mark-Eugene Garcia. In this episode, we explore a fascinating work of political satire and theatrical history with My Excellency, a groundbreaking play by Puerto Rican playwright Luis Rechani Agrait, presented in a newly published English translation by acclaimed American poet William Carlos Williams. Set in an imaginary country inspired by Puerto Rico during the Great Depression, My Excellency follows the rise of Buenaventura Padilla, an idealistic but naïve man who finds himself at the center of a deeply corrupt political system.

Through humor, sharp social commentary, and brilliantly crafted language, the play examines ambition, power, and the ways success can transform those who seek it. We're joined by editor and translator-scholar Jonathan Cohen and actor Gy Mirano to discuss the history behind this remarkable work, Rechani Agrait's contributions to Puerto Rican theater, and William Carlos Williams' unexpected connection to the play and why this decades-old satire continues to resonate today. Here's Jonathan Cohen and Gy Mirano live at the Drama Bookshop.

[1:35] Jonathan Cohen: Thank you so much and many thanks to the Drama Bookshop for having us here this evening to celebrate my new book, my edition of Luis Rechani Agrait's My Excellency, Comedy in Three Acts, and importantly translated by William Carlos Williams. This beautiful book was published last fall by Swan Isle Press based in Chicago, and I want to emphasize that it's a Puerto Rican book. That is, it's about Puerto Rico from start to finish. The author of the play is Puerto Rican. The author of the translation is half Puerto Rican. The author of the foreword is Puerto Rican, and the author of the afterword is Puerto Rican. But above all, the play takes place in a, quote, imaginary country that resembles precisely Puerto Rico.

Me, I'm a wannabe Puerto Rican. I'm a wannabe Puerto Rican. I'm a wannabe Puerto Rican. Really? Our program this evening has four parts. First, I want to talk about how the book came to be, and then Gy Mirano and I will read some excerpts from the play. And that will be followed by a Q&A and book signing. Okay, so firstly, Puerto Rico, 1937. The Great Depression hit Puerto Rico harder than it hit the mainland. Unemployment was much higher there. And in 1937, Luis Rechani Agrait was 37 years old and working as a journalist for the major newspaper on the island, El Mundo. And at the age of 35, he went to live in Puerto Rico. And at the age of 35, in 1937, he writes this play. In Spanish, it's Mi Señoría, My Excellency.

So, it is one of and the first of Rechani's seven plays. And it was a critically acclaimed play. It is now famous. It has been revived in Puerto Rico between 1966 and 2010. And there's talk in Mayaguez of doing a production of it next year in Mayaguez. The play originally was produced at the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan by a group of Puerto Rican playwrights that called themselves the Arellito Group. And they take the name Arellito from the Native American, the Taino dance, a ceremonial dance of the Indian people, of the pre-Columbian people of Puerto Rico. And the vision of the Arellito Group was to write plays about Puerto Rico with Puerto Rican characters, with Puerto Rican landscapes, with Puerto Rican stories.

And Rechani's play was the first of this group's work to be produced. Next year, the following year, the play was produced in 1940. The following year, 1941, William Carlos Williams is 57 years old and has a great reputation as a poet in the United States. And he is invited to Puerto Rico to attend the Inter-American Writers Conference held in San Juan. And it is there that he met Rechani, who gives him a copy of the book, My Excellency, Mi Señoría. And on his return to the United States, William says he'll translate it and find a producer. When in San Juan, the local newspapers were doing big stories about William Carlos Williams in Puerto Rico; it was a big deal that he was there. And it was a big deal that he agreed to translate the play.

In fact, Muna Lee, who brought him to Puerto Rico to participate in the Writers Conference, wrote a news article about Williams and highlighted that he would be translating Mi Señoría. Williams, though, did not find a producer.

[6:29] Jonathan Cohen: In fact, when Williams was in Puerto Rico, his main concern about his writing was not his poetry at the time, but was a play he was working on. Drama was center stage in Williams' life at the time. He was working on a play, an experimental play, called at the time Trial Horse No. 1. It was ultimately produced with a new name, Many Loves. And Many Loves, and Williams' other plays, was published in 1961 by New Directions Books. And let's remember that something hardly mentioned is that Williams' first ambition before becoming a poet was to be a playwright. So in 1959, the Living Theater produced Many Loves, which ran for nearly a full year, down on 14th Street. And Many Loves is a play and verse drama that Williams believed was where it was at. And in an interview in Puerto Rico, he said, I think the most interesting thing now taking shape in the field of letters is the bond of verse with theater, of the lyric art with dramatic art.

[8:02] Jonathan Cohen: Okay, so we fast forward to 2008. That's when I enter the story. That's when my work recovering Williams' translations began. And that's when I was gathering his translations of Spanish language poetry, which New Directions published. And why did I do this? Who cares about Williams, the translator? My feeling is this, that Williams is a major literary figure in the United States. He's a major figure as a translator, as an essayist, his famous collection of essays, In the American Grain, published in 1925. He's famous for his short stories, but his translations have been utterly overlooked. And this is unfortunate, because it's clear to me that to fully get Williams' development and achievement as a writer, it is essential to appreciate his work as a translator.

Yeah, Williams translated poetry from Spanish, French, Greek, and Chinese. He translated fiction from Spanish and French. And from Spanish, he also translated drama. And My Excellency, which he translated in around the year 1941, 42, when he got back from Puerto Rico, and he was so excited about being in Puerto Rico. And again, his middle name, Carlos, is the Puerto Rican in him, surrounded by these two Williams. And it's interesting that in his autobiography, published in 1951, he does not say a word about this transformative experience he expressed to Muna Lee, that occurred when he was in Puerto Rico. And when I talked to Julio Marzan about this, Julio is the author of The Spanish American Roots of William Carlos Williams.

Julio says, oh yeah, Bill wrote the autobiography, not Carlos. Carlos translated My Excellency. So, I found this manuscript in the catalog at the University of Buffalo of Williams Papers. And it's fascinating because it's noted as a translation. And it says that the author, a great, untraceable, which I found stunning. But of course, there was no internet to Google Rechani Agrait. You would Google him now and he's all over. That catalog of Williams Papers was published in the year 1978. And in 1978, on 47th Street, just up the street here, the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater produced an English translation of a play by Rechani called The Company. Yeah, so trying to get my hands around, my mind around Puerto Rican theater, I knew nothing about it.

And I now only know very little about it. So, I reached out to a Puerto Rican scholar who I found online at the University of Puerto Rico in the drama department. I emailed him and he put me in touch with a few Puerto Rican scholars, playwrights. Most important, he put me in touch with a woman named Mirna Casas. And Mirna Casas sadly passed away a few years ago. But before she died, we emailed a lot about Rechani and Puerto Rican theater. And we had long phone calls. Mirna Casas. And finally, in 2024, I found a publisher willing to publish my edition of this play with my essay and with a foreword and an afterword. The afterword is by a prominent Puerto Rican playwright, historian. The foreword is by Julio Marzan, who, as I said, is the author of the Spanish-American Roots of William Carlos Williams.

And a beautiful edition was published. My Excellency. And on the cover, as you'll see on your program, is the brother of the playwright, Carlos Rechani Agrait, who starred in the first original production of My Excellency and played the main character.

[12:50] Jonathan Cohen: Everything denotes simplicity and extreme poverty. Fastened to the dark and dirty walls, photos of labor workers clipped from reviews, perhaps a placard bearing the legend, Vote This Way, and the insignia of the party, a pair of crossed brooms, marked with a cross to show how it should be done.

[15:16] Jonathan Cohen: Perhaps someone has scrawled on the wall, letter by letter, We Want Social Justice. Several chairs, one of them broken down, crammed with paper-covered books and old periodicals.

[15:34] Jonathan Cohen: At the left, a window overlooking the street. Near it, a bench, and beside it, a rough table with an old typewriter.

[15:46] Jonathan Cohen: At the right, a door which opens into other rooms to the lower floor and the street in the rear. At the back, center, a door which opens on a passageway, through which, turning to the left and descending a stair, one comes to the main entrance of the building.

[16:06] Jonathan Cohen: While turning to the right, one arrives at the room where Buenaventura Padilla directs the electoral campaign of his party.

[16:19] Jonathan Cohen: It is a pity that, although the door at the back is open at the moment, you can see only the hallway, and not Buenaventura Padilla, seated at his desk, giving orders, surrounded by eager henchmen. We have to content ourselves with witnessing those of his friends and helpers who, coming or leaving, cross hurriedly through.

[16:47] Jonathan Cohen: But one can hear sometimes clear, sometimes confused, according to the excitement of the moment, the noise of his followers, and now and again, pointlessly, a trumpet blast, like those heard formerly.

[17:04] Jonathan Cohen: Likewise, we shall not be able to see the main entrance to the building, before which a lively crowd has stationed itself all through the night.

[17:17] Jonathan Cohen: Enter Buenaventura, his daughter Carmela, who is a college student, and a teenager named Concepcion.

[17:27] Buenaventura Padilla: Father, what we want is for you to have your breakfast here, where you can be more relaxed. Take your medicines, as you may not be able to take them later.

[17:41] Buenaventura Padilla: Breakfast? Me? And all these people, alone? And these people, and the others? And those downstairs, and those who are coming along the road without sleep, to vote for me? Don't you see them? They're about to drop in the arms of Orpheus.

[18:05] Carmela: With an M, Father.

[18:10] Buenaventura Padilla: Of Orpheum? Let me quickly explain. She wanted her father to say Morpheus, the Greek god of sleep. Instead, he says Orpheum, which many of you may recognize as the house of Orpheus, used for the name of vaudeville theaters.

[18:31] Buenaventura Padilla: Carmelita, dear daughter, this is a struggle of ideals. It's the fight of the poor against the powerful. A fight. You all know what a fight is. In a fight, neither side wants to lose.

[18:51] Buenaventura Padilla: Result? Result that both tries to win. And if we're fighting for the oppressed, am I going to stop for half an hour the launch of my ideals in the field of combat while I stuff myself?

[19:10] Buenaventura Padilla: What are your pretensions? That they throw us on the tragic beach where the sepulchers, in which cold remnants of the corpses of those who conform with living like slaves, rest? What fluency, eh?

[19:29] Buenaventura Padilla: How I can manage the language without universities? And you, say you, what do you want? Don't speak to me if it isn't about ideals.

[19:45] Concepcion: My name is Concepcion. I came to vote for you illegally, Don Buena. I have been stopped because I'm not of age, but Mother says that I have to vote for you because she says that one who does not have enough for necessities, the best thing is to get a job with enough pay to supply a decent living.

[20:12] Concepcion: And the day we win, Mother, you know her, Concepcion, the leader of Garbanzo, our suburb.

[20:21] Buenaventura Padilla: Aha, very good, very good. Juan, look for the illegal card file in the living room.

[20:30] Jonathan Cohen: Act II. A fancy hotel room. Buenaventura, now president, is offered a trip to Europe for medical treatment of his bad heart.

[20:45] Buenaventura Padilla: Go abroad. Me? Really? It has been one of the dreams of my life. The sea. My love for the sea has been the inspiration for some of my most beautiful semaphores.

[21:06] Jonathan Cohen: But the nearest I have gotten to the sea has been the warehouses at the piers. And then a scene with Buenaventura and the new Concepcion.

[21:22] Buenaventura Padilla: Why have you called me, Don Buena?

[21:28] Concepcion: I have called you because you are the stenographer of the Chamber of Deputies, and I must dictate a speech.

[21:38] Buenaventura Padilla: To me?

[21:40] Concepcion: Yes, take a notebook.

[21:42] Buenaventura Padilla: Impossible. It's that I don't know stenography.

[21:48] Concepcion: And what they dictate to you in the Chamber? Why don't you take the Dictatorium?

[21:55] Buenaventura Padilla: The truth of the matter is that I don't know how to write.

[22:01] Jonathan Cohen: Recommended to be the stenographer by Don Juan.

[22:06] Concepcion: You're not going to refuse me a favor because of that, are you? When you're so generous. I was in Don Ramon's room.

[22:17] Buenaventura Padilla: What?

[22:21] Jonathan Cohen: And at the end of Act II, this dialogue between Buenaventura and Juan, his bodyguard.

[22:32] Juan: Don Buena, don't be unduly upset because Carmela is in love with the son of your enemy, Don Ramon.

[22:41] Juan: They're young and so happy.

[22:45] Juan: Here's a telegram with election congratulations. It's signed by about 20 comrades from the peers.

[22:53] Buenaventura Padilla: Do you remember those good people? Perucho, who had votes, and Quique. You remember them?

[23:02] Juan: Quique with the tattoos. They hold you in high esteem. Yes, they do.

[23:09] Juan: Listen. To the Honorable Buenaventura Padilla, President of the Chamber of Deputies, H.E.

[23:19] Juan: His Excellency. His Excellency may feel himself the happiest man on earth.

[23:35] Buenaventura Padilla: Yeah, the happiest man on earth. My Excellency.

[23:48] Jonathan Cohen: Curtain.

[23:52] Jonathan Cohen: So this brings us to the end of our preview.

[24:00] Jonathan Cohen: I will gladly entertain any questions you might have about the play, about Williams.

[24:10] Jonathan Cohen: And David will kindly circulate with the microphone.

[24:13] Jonathan Cohen: As far as I can get it, we will see. I'm a bit tethered, but does anybody have any questions? Yeah.

[24:22] Audience Member: Thank you. This is wonderful. I haven't read it yet because I just got it.

[24:26] Audience Member: But I'm wondering, I see Act 3 is in Spanish. Is that right?

[24:31] Jonathan Cohen: That's right.

[24:32] Audience Member: Cool. And I'm just wondering the artistic decision to keep the third act in Spanish.

[24:39] Jonathan Cohen: That's a great question. I'm glad you asked this question.

[24:45] Jonathan Cohen: Because in Williams' papers, I found only the translation of Act 1 and Act 2.

[24:54] Jonathan Cohen: And so what I decided to do was to compose myself a synopsis of the act, so that readers in English who can't read Spanish know how the story goes and how it ends.

[25:10] Jonathan Cohen: And the publisher, David Rade of Swan Isle Press, suggested that we include the entire Spanish of Act 3.

[25:20] Jonathan Cohen: But again, I have looked high and low for that missing act.

[25:28] Jonathan Cohen: I have had friends in Puerto Rico looking for me.

[25:32] Jonathan Cohen: I have gone to the archives looking high and low.

[25:36] Jonathan Cohen: Maybe it's out there.

[25:40] Jonathan Cohen: Thank you. You said earlier that one cannot really know the poet William Carlos Williams without understanding his translations, and I'm wondering if you could explicate that position a little bit more. That's another good question, and I can talk about that. Let's put it this way. In the beginning, when Williams published his first collection of poems in the year 1909, he was imitating John Keats, and the book was a flop. His buddy, the big shot in the poetry world at the time, rising star Ezra Pound, suggested that he translate Spanish poetry. In the act of translating, a great poet, Pound suggested a Renaissance poet. Williams would have the opportunity to, as a translator, serve as an apprentice to a master poet.

And so, Williams learned that way, that translation offered him the opportunity to discover form, to discover technique, and he did this with poetry throughout his career. In the 1950s, as an older man, he's translating with a Chinese fellow, classical Chinese poetry. Williams didn't know a word of Chinese poetry, but he was attracted to the poetic form of classical Chinese poetry. And translators are always struggling with form and recreating form. So, I could give other examples. For example, I'll stop here. In 1933, Williams and a buddy based in Brooklyn worked up a magazine called Blast, doing proletarian short stories. The first issue includes Williams' famous story, Jean Beinecke. It also includes a translation of his, of a French short story that Williams scholars haven't really addressed.

And what's fascinating is that Williams translated this French short story. But what brought that story to his attention was a review by a guy named Samuel Putnam, who was living in Paris, who was really on the scene in Paris, who, in a small US magazine, wrote an article about what's happening in the European short story. He says there's not much happening really in France in the short story. However, he said, this guy, Emil Fabre, wrote an amazing short story called Cage. And it was amazing. Williams learned how to write a proletarian short story without injecting it with ideology. Just tell the story with emotion. That's all you got to do. And the story of Cage is a story of a miner in northern France on his deathbed, telling the story of his life.

And in that story, the oppression he endured is very clear and emotional. And that became for Williams a model of the short stories he was writing in the 1930s, when, as he said, he was obsessed with the plight of the poor.

[30:02] Gy Mirano: If I may follow up on that a little bit, and then we'll go over here. Do you feel that there is a difference in the responsibility that a translator has translating poetry versus prose versus drama? And if so, what? And if not, what do you feel is the same about that responsibility?

[30:13] Jonathan Cohen: I, for one, believe that the responsibility of the translator is of a great play, is to produce in English a great play. And that generally requires creative liberties. For example, with My Excellency, if you look in the dictionary, a Spanish-English dictionary, you won't see under Señoría, Excellency, you'll see Lordship, or Highness, Your Highness, or Your Honor, but Lordship is the literal translation. But Williams understood that what he called an accurate equivalent requires creative liberty and requires understanding the translator's own language, target language. And I have to laugh when I read that Williams said he didn't speak English. He spoke the American idiom, he said, and he was too old to learn English.

Hello. You mentioned Pound before, and so Williams is famous as a poet, also translated. Langston Hughes, famous as a poet, also translated. I'm wondering if this model of the translating poet is something that we've lost track of. Were all the poets back then translated? You yourself are a translating poet, but there aren't as many of them as I think there used to be, and were they all translators back then in some ways?

[32:03] Gy Mirano: That's a good question, and I don't have the answer really, but my impression is that with the decline of fluency in foreign languages, which has led to a monolingualism, that poets are not translating as they did in the early 20th century, in the late 20th century, and in centuries previous, where translation was pursued by more poets, I believe. And I also believe that we can look at writers who are established as well-known in English, and if we look closely, very closely, we can find that they were actually doing some translation work that's been overlooked. Puerto Ricans and translators have something in common as being second-class citizens, and the good news is that in Puerto Rico, there are people who still have an eye on independence, and translators have been working hard over the past few decades to gain the recognition that they deserve as authors.

[33:24] Jonathan Cohen: Any other questions?

[33:33] Gy Mirano: What's your next project?

[33:35] Jonathan Cohen: My next project is finishing the manuscript I'm doing with David Unger of the amazing Chilean poet Enrique Lin, and I have to laugh when I think of some of the drafts of our translations, the howlers that we both have made, that the public won't see, thank goodness. Again, this book will be coming out in October, and on November 5th at the Cervantes Institute, David and I will be presenting Celeste, Daughter of the Earth, and other early poems.

[34:19] Gy Mirano: Outside of your own translation work, for those of us who are here at the Drama Bookshop, we certainly have many translations of some very famous plays, Chekhov, Ibsen, the Greeks, but would you recommend one major play, poem, and fiction translation that you think anyone who's interested in literature should read?

[34:52] Jonathan Cohen: There's so many, but off the top of my head, there is a poem by Pablo Neruda called Let the Rail Splitter Awake, and it was translated and published in 1950 by a remarkable translator named Waldeen. Her last name was Falkenstein, and professionally, she went just by her first name. She was a prima ballerina, and the Mexican government asked her to come down and start a school of modern dance in Mexico in 1939, and she is known as the founder of modern dance in Mexico, and she became friends with Neruda, and she was also a poet as well, and her translations of Neruda, and there are many translations of Neruda, her translations, I think she brought her understanding of body and dance to her use of language, and this magnificent long poem, Let the Rail Splitter Awake, which is a tribute to the good things about the USA and our history, and this is a perfect year to read Let the Rail Splitter Awake, if only the rail splitter would awake. Anything from drama or fiction?

[36:20] Gy Mirano: I wish my friend Edith Grossman were here.

[36:26] Jonathan Cohen: So, read Edith Grossman's Love in the Time of Cholera by Garcia Marquez, and you will read a beautiful translation where the translator, who had such a keen sense of Spanish, but a keen sense of American English, and not to mention her translation of Don Quixote. She told me she stopped smoking cigarettes, and if she could stop smoking cigarettes, which she did beautifully.

[37:05] David Rigano: And we are back. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Drama Book Show. Our thanks to Jonathan Cohen and Gy Mirano for sharing the fascinating story behind My Excellency and bringing attention to this remarkable work and extraordinary translation. Coming up next on the Drama Book Show, we'll take a look at one of the most fascinating literary and cinematic stories of the 20th century. We'll be joined by author Julie Gilbert for a conversation about Giant Love, exploring the trailblazing novelist Edna Ferber's most popular work. Together, we'll explore the extraordinary career of Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Edna Ferber, the controversy surrounding her best-selling novel Giant, and the making of the legendary film adaptation featuring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean.

From Ferber's groundbreaking career as a novelist and playwright to the behind-the-scenes story of bringing Giant to the screen, this is a conversation about art, ambition, and the lasting impact of an American classic. So remember to follow us on Instagram at Drama Book Show Podcast, follow our Eventbrite at Drama Book Shop, and know that all the books we talk about can be found here at the Book Shop, and so can we, and we will see you at the Book Shop!