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In addition to the pro fessional translators like Manheim, writers and po ets in every era have felt a duty to give foreign literature a new life in another tongue. Goethe, who called this work "one of the most important and valuable concerns in the whole of world affairs," found time to translate literature from ten different languages into German. André Gide argued that every writer "has an obligation to render at least one foreign work of art into his own language." He chose Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, then went on to Hamlet. In America most major modern poets have obeyed Gide's injunction. The result is a vigorous body of English verse that encompasses such varied sources as Icelandic epics (W.H. Auden), La Fontaine's fables (Marianne Moore), Brazilian poetry (Elizabeth Bishop), Russian lyrics (Stanley Kunitz) and contemporary Hungarian poetry (William Jay Smith).
Perhaps the most successful translations by a major American poet are Richard Wilbur's renditions of Molière. The Pulitzer-prizewinning author of seven volumes of poetry has translated The Misan thrope, Tartuffe, School for Wives and The Learned Ladies. His versions have been produced more than 140 times in British, Canadian and U.S. theaters. Wilbur's fluency in replicating 17th century rhymed couplets suggests he was born to the task. In fact, he had only high school French when he landed in southern France in 1944 with the U.S. 36th Division. Most of the soldiers in his unit were country boys from Texas, and Wilbur was enlisted as the company interpreter. Mostly, he recalls, he talked to the French about "what we might want to requisition, like a wheel of cheese."
Later, at Harvard graduate school, French friends introduced Wilbur to a wider menu, including such nonclassical literature as the word games of the modernist writer Raymond Roussel and the visionary prose poems of Villiers de 1'Isle-Adam. Molière entered Wilbur's life in 1948 when, on a visit to Paris, he saw a production of The Misanthrope. Lately, the voice of the French dramatist has begun to resonate through some of the American poet's own writing in a transcendent collaboration. "The experience of impersonating Molière has enlarged the voice of my own poems," says Wilbur. "Sometimes I have the illusion that I speak for him."
Other writers have been tempted to speak for Molière, often with lamentable results. In the 1950s, Poet Morris Bishop translated eight Molière plays into verse that fell as flat as his unrhymed pentameter. The latest effort is a musical-comedy version of The Miser in jive talk.