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NTA Winner 2008
National Translation Award

The 2008 National Translation Award winner is Richard Wilbur for his translation of French dramatist Pierre Corneille’s The Theatre of Illusion.

Richard Wilbur has also published numerous translations of French plays and poetry, specifically dramatists Molière and Jean Racine and poets Valéry, Villon, Baudelaire, Akhmatova, Brodsky, as well as many others. Wilbur is also a poet and author of several books for children as well as a few collections of prose pieces. His books New and Collected Poems (1988) and Things of This World (1956) were both Pulitzer Prize winners. Among his honors are the Wallace Stevens Award, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Frost Medal, the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two Bollingen Prizes, the T. S. Eliot Award, a Ford Foundation Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Memorial Award, the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award, the National Arts Club medal of honor for literature, two PEN translation awards, the Prix de Rome Fellowship, and the Shelley Memorial Award. Wilbur is the former president and chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters as well as Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets. Additionally, he was elected a chevalier of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques and is a former Poet Laureate of the United States from 1987 to 1988.

“The poet and translator Richard Wilbur brings the same integrity and ingenuity to his newest translation, The Theatre of Illusion by Pierre Corneille, as to his earlier esteemed translations of Molière and Racine. As with his previous translations, Wilbur skillfully preserves the rhymed couplets of the original, deftly substituting English pentameters for the original alexandrines.” –- New Criterion

“Concise, pithy rendering of difficult French verse is Mr. Wilbur’s trademark.” — Benjamin Ivry, The Sun, New York

“Moliere’s best translator now gives us a sparklingly speakable version of one of the only comedies by Molière’s great contemporary Corneille.” — Ray Olsen, Booklist