Eugene O’Neill’s Stay at the Atlantic Hotel

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria · Category: Memory · Subcategory: People · Year: 1930

[…] Not strictly as a traveller in transit, but with the idea of spending a few days resting here after residing for some time in France, in 1930 the great American playwright Eugene O’Neill [Nobel Prize in Literature and four-time Pulitzer winner] arrived in Las Palmas accompanied by his wife, Carlota Monterrey. He immediately decided to extend his stay seeing that the placidity and climate of the place provided "the right atmosphere to make the final cuts and corrections" in the text of a play from the trilogy Electra , according to what the Argentine writer León Mirlas wrote in 1955, who was expressly authorised and recommended by O’Neill to be the translator of his works into Spanish.

The American playwright’s stay in our city [apparently, he stayed at the Atlantic hotel, in a building that still stands but is dedicated to other uses] must have been the talk of the enlightened circles of Las Palmas following the publication of the translations of his works by Editorial Sudamericana, Buenos Aires. The translator and friend of O’Neill, León Mirlas, in chapter II of his essay O’Neill and Contemporary Theatre , speaks of his monumental trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra : "To write these thirteen dense acts, of electrifying action, the playwright moved with his wife to France and worked there, in the fruitful isolation of his rural residence in Le Plessis, in 1929 and 1930. At the end of 1930 he went to Las Palmas, in the Canary Islands, seeking a suitable atmosphere for the final revision of his trilogy, already completed."

28.124441, -15.43303