Richard Wilbur – författare

The renowned French playwright Molière's most masterful and most frequently performed play, skillfully translated into English by the Pulitzer Prize–winning translator Richard Wilbur. The rich bourgeois Orgon has become a bigot and prude. The title character, a wily opportunist and swindler, affects sancity and gains complete ascendancy over Ogron, who not only attemps to turn over his fortune but offers his daughter in marriage to his "spiritual" guide. Translated and with an Introduction by Richard Wilbur.

This collection includes Advice to a Prophet and Other Poems, Things of This World, Ceremony and Other Poems, and The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems. "One of the best poets of his generation, Richard Wilbur has imagined excellence, and has created it" (Richard Eberhart, New York Times Book Review).

Poetry lovers and critics will rejoice at the news of this collection from Richard Wilbur, the legendary poet and translator who was called “a hero to a new generation of critics” by the New York Times Book Review, and whose work continues to be masterful, accomplished, whimsical, fresh, and important. A yellow-striped, green measuring worm opens Anterooms, a collection filled with poems that are classic Wilbur, that play with myth and form and examine the human condition through reflections on nature and love. Anterooms also features masterly translations from Mallarmé’s “The Tomb of Edgar Allan Poe,” a previously unpublished Verlaine poem, two poems by Joseph Brodsky, and thirty-seven of Symphosius’s clever Latin riddles. Whether he is considering a snow shovel and domestic life or playfully considering that “Inside homeowner is the word meow,” Wilbur’s new collection is sure to delight everyone from longtime devotees to casual poetry readers. Exploring the interplay between the everyday and the mythic, the sobering and the lighthearted, Anterooms is nothing less than an event in poetic history and a remarkable addition to a master’s oeuvre.

The School for Wives concerns an insecure man who contrives to show the world how to rig an infallible alliance by marrying the perfect bride; The Learned Ladies centers on the domestic calamities wrought by a domineering woman upon her husband, children, and household. “Wilbur...makes Molière into as great an English verse playwright as he was a French one” (John Simon, New York). Introductions by Richard Wilbur.

Phaedra is consumed with passion for Hippolytus, her stepson. Believing her husband dead, she confesses her love to him and is rebuffed. When her husband returns alive, Phaedra convinces him that it was Hippolytus who attempted to seduce her. In his interpretation, Racine replaced the stylized tragedy with human-scale characters and actions. Introduction by Richard Wilbur.

With wit, charm, and grace the interviews in this collection demonstrate what readers of Wilbur's poems long have suspected: that this former U.S. poet laureate is no less persuasive and forceful in extemporaneous speech than he is in verse and prose.Wilbur proves as enlightening and thought-provoking with student reporters from Amherst College, his alma mater, as with journalists for THE PARIS REVIEW, displaying the same dazzling talents that garnered him the Pulitzer Prize in 1957 and again thirty years later.Opinionated yet ever-charitable, he presents the case for rhyme and meter in a dozen different ways in just as many interviews. He expresses a degree of admiration for poetic opposites such as Allen Ginsberg and addresses the objections of his critics.Wilbur's comments and keen insights on his coevals and his craft read as articulately as fine prose. His observations never fail to stimulate or to challenge.