Tartuffe, By Molière

by Molière, Richard Wilbur (Translator)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780156881807
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	01/10/1968
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	176
Sales rank:	633,341
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.42(d)
Age Range:	14 - 18 Years

About the Author

Molière (1622–1673), born Jean-Baptise Poquelin, was a widely renowned French poet, playwright, and actor.

RICHARD WILBUR, one of America’s most beloved poets, has served as poet laureate of the United States. He has received the National Book Award, two Pulitzer Prizes, the National Arts Club medal of honor for literature, and a number of translation prizes, including two Bollingen Prizes and two awards from PEN.

What People are Saying About This

Florent Masse

This dynamic new translation of Tartuffe conveys the subject matter of Molière's perennial masterpiece in a way that resonates for contemporary audiences. Prudence Steiner has modernized and revitalized the text, making its burning and scandalous tone stand out, as it does in the original French. The thorough introduction to the play skillfully invites the reader into the dark and controversial world of Tartuffe. (Florent Masse, Princeton University)

Jim Carmody

The new Steiner Tartuffe offers welcome relief from all the rhymed translations that make Molière sound like a third-rate Restoration poet while creating the (false) impression that verbal dexterity and wit trump all other values in the great comic playwright's dramaturgy. Steiner's crisp, lucid prose - her adroitly balanced sentences are especially effective at conveying the slippery rhetoric of Tartuffe's seductions - unfolds the plot and characters of Molière's play with an unaccustomed clarity, presenting the ideological clashes of the play with a bluntness many other translations attenuate. Roger Herzel's Introduction is well-focused for those encountering Molière for the first time and informed throughout by his own excellent scholarship. (Jim Carmody, University of California, San Diego)