Simone Weil, Venice Saved: A Tragedy in Three Acts

editor: Bradley Jersak translator: Eric H. Janzen

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Venice Saved by Simone Weil is an unfinished tragedy written for the stage in the last years of her life. It was her only work of historical fiction, but also features a substantial amount of free verse. The plot recalls an attempted sack of Venice by Spanish mercenaries in 1618. Weil reworks earlier accounts to express her moral and political convictions about the brutality of force and affliction, and the power of self-giving (kenotic) surrender. The story turns and becomes more poetic as Jaffier, one of the conspirators, is awakened to the beauty of Venice. This is the first bilingual and only hardcover edition of the play, with the original French on facing pages to Eric H. Janzen’s fresh translation. Janzen, himself a poet and songwriter, brings out the elegance of Weil’s poems and the grandiosity of her prose. Bradley Jersak, a Weil scholar, contributes an Introduction and the essay, “An Astonishing Life,” highlighting Weil’s political theology (and anti-theodicy) of the Cross, which subtly permeates the book. The play holds fresh resonance as we confront the 21st century’s new faces of the “social beast” that she laid down her life to expose and oppose.