Moliere: The Complete Richard Wilbur Translations, Volume 1: The Bungler / Lover's Quarrels / The Imaginary Cuckhold, or Sganarelle / The School for H Hardcover -

From the publisher

For the 400th anniversary of Moliere's birth, Richard Wilbur's unsurpassed translations of Molire'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 Molire'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 Molire 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 Molire's plays are brought together in two-volume Library of America edition, fulfilling the poet's vision for the translations. This first volume comprises Molire'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 fiancs, which so delighted female theater goers in Moliere's seventeenth-century France; and Don Juan, Molire'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 Comdie-Franaise 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.

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