{"product_id":"my-excellency","title":"My Excellency","description":"\u003cb\u003eWilliam Carlos Williams’s “lost” translation of Luis Rechani Agrait’s masterpiece.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e William Carlos Williams’s passion for his matrilineal Puerto Rican roots led him to visit Puerto Rico for the first time in 1941. There at a writers’ conference, he befriended the playwright Luis Rechani Agrait, who gave him his play \u003ci\u003eMi señoría\u003c\/i\u003e, staged to acclaim the previous year. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eMy Excellency\u003c\/i\u003e, as Williams calls the play in his translation, is a political farce set in an “imaginary country” that resembles Puerto Rico during the Great Depression, with its high unemployment and labor unrest. The play focuses on the plight of an idealistic but naive man, Buenaventura Padilla, in a completely corrupt political system. Through an unscrupulous election, he becomes the nation’s leader.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The play is successful as a satire largely because of Buenaventura’s hilarious language—recreated by Williams—with its pompous style combined with stunning malapropisms and clownish errors in history and grammar. The play’s very title is a laughable malapropism.\u003ci\u003e My Excellency\u003c\/i\u003e shows the corrupting power of success and the tragic flaw of materialism. Driving the comedy in Williams’s translation is his firm command of the play’s dialogue interwoven with popular idioms in which the charm of pure nonsense abounds. This edition is Luis Rechani Agrait’s debut as a playwright in English.","brand":"Swan Isle Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54846661296472,"sku":"9781961056114","price":25.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9781961056114.jpg?v=1778662838","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/my-excellency","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}