In this episode, we explore My Excellency with presenter and reader Jonathan Cohen, an award-winning poet, translator, essayist, and scholar of inter-American literature, whose work has focused extensively on bringing Spanish-language literature to English-speaking audiences. Cohen is the editor of My Excellency, his edition of William Carlos Williams’s translation of the Puerto Rican play, published by Swan Isle Press in 2025. Joining him is actress, voice-over artist, producer, and arts advocate Gy Mirano, whose work spans theater, film, television, and cultural institutions throughout New York. We also look at the remarkable connection between Puerto Rican dramatist Luis Rechani Agrait and American modernist poet William Carlos Williams. Rechani Agrait was one of Puerto Rico’s major dramatists of the twentieth century, and My Excellency was first produced in 1940 by the Sociedad Dramática Areyto, an experimental theater company dedicated to developing a distinctly Puerto Rican national theater. Set in an “imaginary country” resembling Puerto Rico during the Great Depression, My Excellency is a political farce about Buenaventura Padilla, an idealistic but naive man who rises to power through a corrupt election. His pompous language, malapropisms, and hilarious mistakes turn the political satire into a comedy about corruption, materialism, and the corrupting power of success. Williams’s translation preserves the play’s distinctive mixture of popular idiom, nonsense, and verbal invention, bringing Rechani Agrait’s political comedy to a new English-speaking audience. Together, Cohen and Mirano read from the play, after he discusses its Puerto Rican theatrical history and Williams’s fascinating role as translator—connecting two major literary voices across language, culture, and time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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