For the 400th anniversary of Moliere’s birth, Richard Wilbur’s unsurpassed translations of Moli re’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 Moli re’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 Moli re 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 Moli re’s plays are brought together in two-volume Library of America edition, fulfilling the poet’s vision for the translations.

This first volume comprises Moli re’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 fiances, which so delighted female theater goers in Moliere’s seventeenth-century France; and Don Juan, Moli re’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 Comedie-Fran aise 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.