Word: moli
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Perhaps the most successful translations by a major American poet are Richard Wilbur's renditions of Molière. The Pulitzer-prizewinning author of seven volumes of poetry has translated The Misan thrope, Tartuffe, School for Wives and The Learned Ladies. His versions have been produced more than 140 times in British, Canadian and U.S. theaters. Wilbur's fluency in replicating 17th century rhymed couplets suggests he was born to the task. In fact, he had only high school French when he landed in southern France in 1944 with the U.S. 36th Division. Most of the soldiers...
Later, at Harvard graduate school, French friends introduced Wilbur to a wider menu, including such nonclassical literature as the word games of the modernist writer Raymond Roussel and the visionary prose poems of Villiers de 1'Isle-Adam. Molière entered Wilbur's life in 1948 when, on a visit to Paris, he saw a production of The Misanthrope. Lately, the voice of the French dramatist has begun to resonate through some of the American poet's own writing in a transcendent collaboration. "The experience of impersonating Molière has enlarged the voice...
Other writers have been tempted to speak for Molière, often with lamentable results. In the 1950s, Poet Morris Bishop translated eight Molière plays into verse that fell as flat as his unrhymed pentameter. The latest effort is a musical-comedy version of The Miser in jive talk...
...entertainment is often indistinct, and never more so than in musical theater. We tend to think of opera, the sung play, as the pinnacle of a form whose lower manifestations include the Viennese operetta and the Broadway show. But such rigid categorizing is myopic. Like M. Jourdain in Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who was delighted to discover that he had been speaking prose all his life, even composers with the most commercial motives may turn out to have been writing memorable, lasting scores. Two of the most electrifying operas of the '70s, for example, were...
Writers have been actors for a long time, of course; Shakespeare and Molière learned their craft on the boards performing in their own plays. It can also be, and often is, argued that writing is a form of acting. "I act all my parts when I write a play," observes Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman, A View from the Bridge). Miller says that he would probably have become a player if he had failed as a playwright. "I well could have," he says. "Some people think I'm pretty good...