Quote of the Day (Richard Wilbur, on a Job of Poetry)

“One of the jobs of poetry is to make the unbearable bearable by clear, precise confrontation.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Richard Wilbur (1921-2017), “The Art of Poetry No. 22” (interviewed by Peter A. Stitt, Helen McCloy Ellison and Ellesa Clay High), The Paris Review, Issue 72 (Winter 1977)

Quote of the Day (Moliere, on Reason Vs. Love)

“Each day my reason tells me so;
But reason doesn't rule in love, you know.”—French playwright, actor, and theater manager Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, aka Moliere (1622-1673), The Misanthrope, translated by Richard Wilbur (1666)

The image accompanying this post, from a 2013 production of The Misanthrope at the University of Chicago’s Court Theatre, features Erik Hellman as Alceste, Moliere’s title character, and Grace Gealey as Celimene, the coquette who distracts him from reason.

This will not be a Happy Valentine’s Day for Alceste!

Quote of the Day (Moliere, on How Women Can ‘Run Rings Around the Cleverest Man’)

“Yes, all these stern precautions are inhuman.
Are we in Turkey, where they lock up women?
 It's said that females there are slaves or worse,
And that's why Turks are under Heaven's curse.
Our honor, sir, is truly very frail
If we, to keep it, must be kept in jail.
But do you think that such severities
Bar us, in fact, from doing what we please,
Or that, when we're dead set upon some plan,
We can't run rings around the cleverest man?
All these constraints are vain and ludicrous:
The best course, always, is to trust in us.
It's dangerous, Sir, to underrate our gender.
Our honor likes to be its own defender.
It almost gives us a desire to sin
When men mount guard on us and lock us in,
And if my husband were so prone to doubt me,
I just might justify his fears about me.”—French playwright and satirist Moliere (1622-1673), The School for Husbands (1661), translated by Richard Wilbur (1992)

Quote of the Day (Poet Richard Wilbur, Translating Moliere With Verve)

“I may be pious, but I’m human too:
With your celestial charms before his eyes,
A man has not the power to be wise.
I know such words sound strangely, coming from me,         
But I’m no angel, nor was meant to be,
And if you blame my passion, you must needs        
Reproach as well the charms on which it feeds.
Your loveliness I had no sooner seen
Than you became my soul’s unrivalled queen;
If, in compassion for my soul’s distress,
You’ll stoop to comfort my unworthiness,
I’ll raise to you, in thanks for that sweet manna,
An endless hymn, an infinite hosanna.
With me, of course, there need be no anxiety,
No fear of scandal or of notoriety.”— French playwright Moliere (1622-1673), Tartuffe (1664; English translation by Richard Wilbur, 1965)

Richard Wilbur, born 100 years ago today in New York City, was as honored as a poet can get: the second poet laureate of the U.S. following Robert Penn Warren, as well as a Pulitzer and National Book Award winner. His work reflects his belief, as stated in a Paris Review interview, that “the universe is full of glorious energy, that the energy tends to take pattern and shape, and that the ultimate character of things is comely and good.”

Though it is uncharacteristic of the bulk of his work, Wilbur’s translations of Moliere, Voltaire, and Racine plays have their own unique merit, with Moliere in particular fulfilling what I usually choose in a “Quote of the Day” for the first and last days of the workweek: humor to get readers through tough hours.

I encountered Wilbur’s Tartuffe translation in a high-school anthology, and it made me eager to watch this comedy about a religious hypocrite when the Circle in the Square production was aired on public television in the 1970s. The excerpt above, I think, will give you an idea of its sprightliness, with its rhyming couplets rendering the playwright in as close an English approximation of the joy and wit of the French original as it may be possible to get.

Photo of the Day: The 'Beautiful Changes' of a Fall Meadow

“One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides  

The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies

On water; it glides

So from the walker, it turns

Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you  

Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.”—American poet-translator Richard Wilbur (1921-2017), “The Beautiful Changes,” from Collected Poems 1943-2004 (2004)

I took this photo a year ago in Flat Rock Brook, in my hometown, Englewood, NJ.

Quote of the Day (Richard Wilbur, on a March Storm)

“Beech leaves which might have clung

Parching for six weeks more

Were stripped by last night's gale

Which made so black a roar.”— American poet Richard Wilbur (1921-), “March,” in The Four Seasons: Poems, edited by J.D. McClatchy (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets edition, 2008)

Quote of the Day (Richard Wilbur, on the ‘Dying of the Year’)

“Now winter downs the dying of the year,  

And night is all a settlement of snow;

From the soft street the rooms of houses show  

A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,  

Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin  

And still allows some stirring down within.”—Richard Wilbur, “Year’s End”