Overview

The ballet is famous. The novella that inspired it has never had a proper English edition - until now. In a small Andalusian town, sometime in the early 1800s, the Corregidor - a short, round-shouldered magistrate whose authority is the law and whose person is ridiculous - has decided he wants the miller's wife. She is beautiful, confident, and entirely unintimidated. Her husband is watchful. The night that follows is a comedy of sexual corruption, disguise, and the nature of power, built on a folk tale as old as the hills and timed with the precision of a watch. At the centre of it all: a three-cornered hat, left behind at the wrong house, put on in the dark by the wrong man - and every encounter that follows. Pedro Antonio de Alarcón (1833-1891) was born in Guadix, in the deep south of Spain, and grew up inside the Andalusian social world his fiction describes with such precision. El sombrero de tres picos (1874) is his most celebrated work: a short, sharp comedy of authority - the source of Manuel de Falla's famous 1919 ballet, with sets and costumes by Picasso and choreography by Massine. It is 120 pages long and has been entertaining audiences for a century and a half. Alarcón intended both facts. Inés Bou's translation is the first modern English literary edition of this novella. It restores what the Victorian translations dissolved: the exact registers of authority and deference, the Andalusian folk proverbs, the social world in which a hat is not merely a costume but a demonstration about what power is made of and who it belongs to. For readers of Voltaire, Stendhal, and Nikolai Gogol.

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