Welcome to the Spring 2024 issue of The Mercurian!

Following up on Magda Romanska’s translation of the great Polish film director Andrzej Wajda’s adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment published in the Fall 2023 issue of The Mercurian, this issue begins with Romanska’s translation of Wajda’s adaptation of Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz’s stage adaptation of his novella June Night (2001). Long time readers of The Mercurian will also remember her translation of Polish playwright Boguslaw Schaeffer’s play HereThere, which appeared in Volume 2, No. 1.  As Romanska explains in her introduction, Iwaszkiewicz prepared the stage adaptation especially for Wajda who directed it in 2002.  The stage version of June Night was filmed for the Polish Television Theatre, and following Iwaszkiewicz’s death, in addition to Wajda, two other screenwriters contributed to the adaptation, Andrzej Domalik and Zbigniew Kamiński. This translation is of that final film version adapted and directed by Wajda, and his collaborators.  Set in 1863 in a portion of what was then Poland and is now Ukraine, the play opens in the aftermath of the January uprising, one of several failed attempts to end Russian occupation, making it all the more pertinent to the present day when Russia has invaded Ukraine.  Wajda’s adaptation focuses upon the ethical choices individuals make in the face of historical events that confront us with questions of life and death.

June Night is followed by Michael McDowell and Laurence Senelick’s translation of Austrian Ferdinand Raimund’s “Romantic-Comic Original-Musical Play” The Mountain King and the Misanthrope from 1828.  As Senelick’s introduction to the translation describes, The Mountain King and the Misanthrope is a prime example of the magical farce, a peculiarly Viennese dramatic genre popular during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the best known of which is Mozart’s The Magic Flute.  Raimund’s folk comedy filled with mountain sprites and comic human characters combines the tragic with the humorous to explore the nature of justice and human existence.  In a curious way The Mountain King and the Misanthrope is an appropriate companion piece to June Night since at the time that Raimund wrote the play Austria was a police state under Metternich’s rule and what could and could not be said on stage was highly restricted.  The magical farce genre provided a way to evade censorship and stimulate audience imagination.

Next comes Jacqueline E. Bixler’s translation of Mexican playwright Sergio López Vigueras’ 1985 play The Bullet.  As Bixler talks about in her introduction to the translation, López Vigueras’ play is a compressed piece of theatrical poetry that explodes like the firing of a bullet.  This short play dives deeply into the daily lives of working-class people in Mexico City.  Bixler’s translations of Emilio Carballido’s Photograph on the Beach and Alejandro Ricaño’s Hotel Good Luck appeared in Vol. 5, No. 2 (Fall 2014) and Vol. 7, No. 3 (Spring 2019) of The Mercurian respectively.

The Bullet is followed by Phyllis Zatlin’s translation of Spanish playwright Luis Araújo’s play Kafka in Love.  Araújo’s epistolary play is based on the letters between Franz Kafka and Felice Bauer from 1912-1917, as well as references to Kafka’s works such as The Trial and Metamorphosis.  While characters reading letters on stage can result in a static theatrical experience, Araújo’s text and, in Zatlin’s description of it in her introduction, the play’s initial staging, avoided that trap.  Zatlin’s work last appeared in The Mercurian in Vol. 9, No. 3 with her translation of Spanish playwright Gracia Morales’ Unidentified NN 12.  Her translations of both French and Spanish playwrights’ work can be found in Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring 2007), Vol. 2, No. 3 (Spring 2009), Vol. 5, No. 3 (Spring 2015), and Vol. 8, No. 3 (Spring 2021).

The issue concludes with three book reviews:  May Summer Farnsworth’s review of Argentine playwright Romina Paula’s Fauna and Other Plays translated by April Sweeney, Brenda Werth, and Jean Graham-Jones; Amalia Gladhart’s review of Argentine playwright Santiago Loza’s Nothing to Do With Love and Other Plays, translated by Samuel Buggeln and Ariel Gurevich; and Zhixuan Zhu’s review of Sinophone Adaptations of Shakespeare: An Anthology, 1987-2007), edited by Alexa Alice Joubin.

Back issues of The Mercurian can be found at under the “Archives” tab on our website: https://the-mercurian.com/.  As the theatre is nothing without its audience, The Mercurian welcomes your comments, questions, complaints, and critiques. Deadline for submissions for consideration for Volume 10, No. 2 Fall 2024 will be September 15, 2024.

—Adam Versényi