.jpg)
Richard Wilbur as Translator
FIRST PUBLISHED IN AMERICAN THEATER (APRIL 2009)
Introduction
No major American poet today has had a longer or closer relationship with theater than Richard Wilbur. He has been active in the field for six decades—ever since his translation of Molière’s The Misanthrope opened in 1955 at the legendary Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But Wilbur’s sustained and prolific involvement in theater has been unusual. He has not written plays, not even verse drama. All of Wilbur’s theatrical works, with the notable exception of lyrics for one Broadway musical (Leonard Bernstein’s Candide), have been translations of classical French theater, especially the comedies of Molière.
The son of a painter, Wilbur was born in New York City in 1921 but was raised in rural New Jersey. He attended Amherst where he chaired the college newspaper—an activity that seems typical for a future writer—but he also spent two summers riding the rails as a hobo in Depression-era America. Graduating in 1942 as America entered World War II, Wilbur married his college sweetheart Charlotte Ward and joined the U.S. Army. He initially trained as a cryptographer, but his leftist associations led the Army to transfer him to infantry. For the next three years he experienced some of the war’s most brutal combat from the Allied landing on the beaches of Italy to the final push into Germany. He often read in the lulls between battles and once even wrote a poem in a foxhole.
After the war Wilbur started graduate school at Harvard where he became friends with Robert Frost. He had written poems since childhood, but the aspiring scholar now began working on them seriously. His literary success was almost immediate. He was from the first a natural poet with a distinctive and powerful personal style. With the publication of his first two books, The Beautiful Changes (1947) and Ceremony (1950), Wilbur was recognized as one of the finest poets of his generation, a judgment that has never been seriously been challenged. Even his occasional detractors recognize his abundant talent; their complaint is only that he has not been sufficiently ambitious in exploring it. His champions have no hesitation in acclaiming him one of the major American poets of his age.
Awards came early in his career and have never stopped. Wilbur is the only living American poet to have won the Pulitzer Prize twice. He has also been awarded both the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize. He also served as U.S. Poet Laureate.
Wilbur’s work is elegantly formal and deeply intelligent—two literary qualities that in a lesser talent might undercut the poetry’s emotional immediacy or lyric force. But Wilbur’s language is so fresh and sensuously alive that his poems never seem stiff or preordained. He has the lyric poet’s irreplaceable gift of bringing the reader directly into an experience in all its heady complexity. While Wilbur is alert to the dark side of human existence, he is more receptive to the brighter emotions of compassion, love, and joy. Few American poets since Whitman have offered such compelling optimism.
Wilbur’s involvement with the theater began in 1952 when he won a Guggenheim Fellowship to write an original verse drama. Working on his own plays, he despaired. “They didn’t come off,” he later admitted. “They were very bad, extremely wooden.” To learn the craft of verse drama, Wilbur decided to translate Molière’s The Misanthrope. Little did he guess that he had begun what would eventually grow into a major part of his life’s work as well as one of the great translation projects in American literature.
Over the next forty years Wilbur would produce lively, sophisticated and eminently stageworthy versions of Molière’s verse comedies–The Misanthrope (1955), Tartuffe (1963), The School for Wives (1971), The Learned Ladies (1978), The School for Husbands (1992), Sganarelle or The Imaginary Cuckold (1993), Amphitryon (1995), Don Juan (1998), The Bungler (2000), and Lover’s Quarrel (2005). The only Molière verse play that has escaped his grasp is Dom Garcie de Navarre, which Wilbur concedes is “universally considered a lemon.” From the moment his first Molière translation was staged fifty-four years ago, his versions have delighted and impressed audiences. Widely produced from Broadway to college campuses, Wilbur’s versions helped create a Molière revival across North America that continues to this day. He also translated two neo-classical verse tragedies by Racine–Andromache (1982) and Phaedre (1986). More recently he has turned his attention to the works of Corneille.
It would be hard to overpraise Wilbur’s special genius for verse translation. Whether recreating the witty badinage of Molière or the high tragic music of Racine and Corneille, Wilbur has the uncanny ability to create English versions that never feel like translations. They read and play as if they were originally written in English. The same virtue is equally evident in his extensive translations of lyric poetry from French, Italian, Russian, and Romanian. (One famous poet told me that Wilbur’s translations were as good as her originals—and this was a writer not given to flattery.) The distinction, variety, and extent of his efforts have earned him a position as one of the greatest translators in the history of American poetry. His French translations alone fill half a bookshelf.
Happy to leave the drama on the stage, Wilbur has led a generally quiet and settled life. Now 88, he lives in the same house in Cummington, Massachusetts he moved into with his wife family in 1965. Two years ago his wife Charlee died. They had been married sixty-five years. Wilbur still works almost every day, typing his poems on a venerable L. C. Smith manual. His literary powers remain intimidatingly intact, as two superb new poems in the New Yorker last January amply demonstrate. He has also finished two major theatrical translations from Corneille—a tragedy (The Cid) and a comedy (The Liar). These new Corneille versions will be published this spring. Both of them await their first production.
Interview
How did you first become interested in Molière?
Well, Dana, it wasn’t in school, where my French studies were all about grammar, a subject to which I’ve always had a foolish resistance. During World War II, when my division landed in southern France and swept north, I became a halting interpreter for my company, and picked up a book or two to read in transit: something by Pierre Louys, some poems of Louis Aragon. After the war, when I went to Harvard on the GI Bill, my friends André du Bouchet and Pierre Schneider got me to reading such Frenchmen as Nerval and Villiers de l'Isle Adam. But is wasn’t until 1948, when my wife and I went to Paris on a leave from Harvard’s Society of Fellows, that I encountered Molière, in a stunning performance of Le Misanthrope, starring Pierre Dux, at the Comedié Française.
What prompted your first translation of Molière?
In 1952, Eliot and Christopher Fry had brought verse drama to Broadway, and in Cambridge the Poets’ Theatre was in high gear. I proposed to the Guggenheim Foundation that I write a verse play, but once I was funded, and established in an adobe study in New Mexico, I proved unripe for the task. It then occurred to me that by translating The Misanthrope I could keep my word and learn something.
Can you describe your process of translating Molière?
I read the play, mostly unassisted by scholarship or criticism, and get to know its characters and milieu. Then I render it couplet by couplet, aiming for a maximum fidelity to sense, form, and tone. My chief virtue as a translator is stubbornness: I will spend a whole spring day, a perfect day for tennis, getting one or two lines right. Now that I have seen some splendid productions of my Molière translations, I say the lines aloud as I render them, in what I hope is the manner of Brian Bedford or Sada Thompson.
What is the hardest part of translating Molière?
The hardest thing is to find, playing with and against the pentameter, just the right timing for a witty or comical line. Do the rehearsals and production process change your work? Because my translations are so slavish, I am not asked to do any re-writing at the rehearsal stage. But attending rehearsals and productions has gradually improved my ability to think and feel theatrically.
As a poet, do you think you approach translating Molière differently from the way a playwright might?
I’m sure that a playwright would more quickly visualize the scene, the action, the choreography, and authorized “business.” But I would not defer to him about the text. Because Molière’s comedies are so thoroughly written, I am not likely to be wrong about his drift and tone. Poetry tends to be a very personal art, while theater is necessarily collaborative.
How has the experience in the theater affected your work?
My lyrics for the musical show Candide were collaborative, and I enjoyed working with Lenny Bernstein, but I think that my poems were not altered by the process. In doing the Molière translations, however, I know that I have changed as a poet: I am readier to speak out of a single mood or mask, as in “Two Voices in a Meadow” or that long monologue “The Mind-Reader.”
How does Molière speak to contemporary American audiences?
Molière’s language is readily understood by any American audience. So are the plots of his major comedies, which study the effect of an unbalanced central figure on those about him. Molière’s idea of what is normal, natural, or balanced is very much like our own, and so there is no need for “up-dating.” I have no patience with the sort of director who, thinking to render Alceste accessible, has him dress and behave like a hippie who “tells it like it is.” That did happen once, and I have not forgotten it.
You have also translated plays by Racine and Corneille. Is the old actor’s adage true for translation, that playing comedy is harder than tragedy?
I’ve found it easier to translate Molière’s comedies. The spare nobility of Racine is very challenging, and in rendering a heroic play like Corneille’s Le Cid one has to be careful not to slip into the oratorical.
Have there been particular productions of Molière or your other theatrical works that remain particularly memorable?
There have been fine productions in big towns and small, and throughout our splendid galaxy of repertory theaters. Of course, no later performance could so amaze me as the Misanthrope’s premiere at the Poets’ Theatre (1955), in which the poet Peter Davison played the lead. To my great joy, the demand for tickets was such that the show had to be moved from its original garret-like venue to MIT’s new auditorium. And then there was the next year’s New York production, directed by Stephen Porter at Theatre East, and starring Ellis Raab and Jackie Brookes.
Has working with any particular actor influenced your approach to translation?
Yes, Brian Bedford has been my friend for many years, and I have seen him in many roles. He was unforgettable as Richard II, to mention but one of his triumphs, and he has been the life of many Molière productions. If I think of him while translating, it enlivens the words and gives me a more palpable sense of the work.
Were there other translations or classical theatre that inspired the direction of your own work?
When I was fifteen or so, I saw Walter Hampden do Cyrano at some New York playhouse. Whose translation was used I don’t know, but I think the experience may have implanted in me the notion that old French plays could be viable in contemporary American theater.
What literary translators do you most admire?
Dana, the last century has been a great age of translation, and the list of heroes is too long to recite. Let me say just this. Yesterday I came upon a translation by Miller Williams of a poem by the great Trastevere poet Belli, and said to myself, “That’s it. It will never have to be translated again.” The translators whom I most esteem are those who do not translate pro tem, but work in the wild hope of doing the job once and for all.
You are a singularly remarkable translator of poetry. Why do you devote so much creative energy to translation?
Translation must be faithful, and so it can’t be creative ab ovo. But at the very least it uses a poet’s abilities between the visits of his Muse. I think it can limber his voice and range, and give him great satisfactions, and with luck can bring him royalties.
Why are there so few literary translations published in the U.S.?
As chairman of the NEA, you would know better than I whether publishers are reluctant to bring out literary translations. If that is true in all genres, they should be ashamed. As a translator of classic French drama, I have of course often heard the editorial adage, “Plays don’t sell.”
Do you have any advice for poets or playwrights who want to translate or produce classical theater?
I would urge such translators to do their work faithfully and straight, and to insist on the same qualities in any production. Death to adaptations and adulterations.