William Carlos Williams’s “lost” translation of Luis Rechani Agrait’s masterpiece.

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 Mi señoría, staged to acclaim the previous year. 

My Excellency, 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.

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. My Excellency 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.

Luis Rechani Agrait (1902–1994) is one of Puerto Rico’s major dramatists of the twentieth century whose masterpiece is My Excellency. Its translation by William Carlos Williams is his debut in the Anglophone world. William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) is a major American poet/author of the twentieth century and an influential founder of literary modernism. His considerable work as a translator as well as a playwright has been largely overlooked. Jonathan Cohen is an award-winning translator of Latin American poetry and a scholar of inter-American literature.