For the 400th anniversary of Moliere's birth, Richard Wilbur's
unsurpassed translations of Molière's plays--themselves towering
achievements in English verse--are brought together by Library of
America in a two-volume edition
One of the most accomplished American poets of his generation, Richard
Wilbur (1921-2017) was also a prolific translator of French and Russian
literature. His verse translations of Molière's plays are especially
admired by readers and are still performed today in theaters around the
world. Wilbur, the critic John Simon once wrote, makes Molière into as
great an English verse playwright as he was a French one. Now, for the
first time, all ten of Wilbur's unsurpassed translations of Molière's
plays are brought together in two-volume Library of America edition,
fulfilling the poet's vision for the translations.
This first volume comprises Molière's delightful early farces The
Bungler, Lover's Quarrels, and The Imaginary Cuckhold, or
Sganarelle; the comedies The School for Husbands and The School for
Wives, about the efforts of middle-aged men to control their young
wives or fiancés, which so delighted female theater goers in Moliere's
seventeenth-century France; and Don Juan, Molière's retelling of the Don
Juan story, performed only briefly in the playwright's lifetime before
pious censure forced it to close and not part of the repertoire of the
Comédie-Française until 1847. This volume includes the original
introductions by Richard Wilbur and a foreword by Adam Gopnik on the
exquisite art of Wilbur's translations.
