Word: witting
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...Huntington, unfortunately, the play does not get any better. The translation by Pulitzer-prize winning poet Richard Wilbur is surprisingly banal. One might expect more from the leading English translator of Molière’s comedies. But whereas Molière is famous for an elegant wit, Wilbur gives us only broad, limerick-like verse. This is by no means helped by the shortcomings of the production’s actors. There exist plenty of prose translations of Amphitryon; why director Darko Tresnjak didn’t opt for one of these remains a mystery. When not trying...
...should also tell her about the news of the obvious truth. That took me decades to learn. As a young writer, I was the dandiest, cleverest wit and wise guy--a cinch if one possesses the meager gifts. And then after witnessing enough pain and plain courage in the world, I simply reversed course and started writing about the life before my eyes. Eventually one understands that the world is largely made up of obvious truths, lying in the open, begging to be repeated...
...composed presence is palpable in Manets like the Bunch of Asparagus, 1880, with its almost miraculous rendering of the blue tips of the asparagus spears. (It sold, fresh off the easel, to a collector named Charles Ephrussi. Manet felt he had been paid too generously, and with his usual wit he sent Ephrussi a tiny painting of a single asparagus spear, with a note: "This one was missing from your bunch...
Such fragments are all that is left of Heraclitus' great book, On Nature, which was lost many centuries ago. They come to us with a scattered, enigmatic quality--epigrams and bits of poetry saved from the ruins. But they also have a wit and, for someone known as an obscure philosopher, a prismatic clarity that travels well across centuries. The thoughts remain fresh and profound. Haxton's translation shines them up handsomely. "To a god the wisdom/of the wisest man/sounds apish. Beauty/in a human face/looks apish too./In everything/we have attained/the excellence of apes...
...good to have the author's subtle wit and love of wordplay on display again, even in small doses. And the book on beasts will be of special interest to the faithful because it purports to be a facsimile of a copy actually owned by Harry Potter and bearing his schoolboyish annotations. When, for example, the author promises "A Brief History of Muggle Awareness of Fantastic Beasts," Harry circles "Brief" and scrawls "you liar." No wonder so many readers love this...