Prosper Mérimée: Plays on Hispanic Themes

by Oscar Mandel, Oscar Mandel

On a remote, fortified homestead in the Andes, a ferocious overlord attempts to rape his daughter and subsequently murders her. In a convent school in Havana, two adolescent girls fall in love with their priest, with fatal consequences. In Spain, a nobleman marries a village girl and an ideal of social equality collides with life’s brutal realities. And in Lima, a beautiful and clever actress bamboozles her lover, the governor of Peru.
Prosper Mérimée, best remembered for his creation of Carmen , wrote these plays – three of them powerfully tragic and the other a delicious comedy – in his late twenties, at the height of his creative powers. They are brought together in this volume in superbly stageworthy translations, preceded by a thorough introduction to Mérimée’s unjustly neglected body of dramatic works.

204 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2003

About the author

Oscar Mandel, poète, traducteur, fabuliste et dramaturge américain, est né en 1926 à Anvers (Belgique). En 1939, adolescent, il est contraint d'émigrer avec sa famille vers les États-Unis.
Il écrit aussi bien en anglais qu'en français.

Oscar Mandel, American poet, translator, fabulist and playwright, was born in 1926 in Antwerp (Belgium). In 1939, a teenager, he was forced to emigrate with his family to the United States.
He writes both in English and French.