For the 400th anniversary of Moliere's birth, all of Richard Wilbur's
unsurpassed translations of Molière's plays--themselves towering
achievements in English verse--are brought together for the first time
in this two-volume gift set.
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 around the world.
Wilbur, the critic John Simon 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 boxed set, fulfilling the poet's
vision for the translations.
The first volume comprises Molière's delightful early farces The
Bungler, Lovers' 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
timeless 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.
The second volume includes the elusive masterpiece, The Misanthrope,
often said to occupy the same space in comedy as Shakespeare's Hamlet
does in tragedy; the fantastic farce Amphitryon, about how Jupiter and
Mercury commandeer the identities of two mortals; Tartuffe, Molière's
biting satire of religious hypocrisy; and The Learned Ladies, like
Tarfuffe, a drama of a household turned suddenly upside down. These
volumes include the original introductions by Richard Wilbur and a
foreword by Adam Gopnik on the exquisite art of Wilbur's translations.
