The pedants | Molière

The play of the pretentious is the one on which the reputation of Molière the fine playwright was built, and he became famous because of it as the greatest writer of comedy and the most talented comic actor of his time. However, this remarkable success opened a new era of struggle against those who called him "the whip of Paris." Molière (1622-1673) loved the theater from his early youth, and he left the law profession at the age of twenty-one. He, along with Madeleine and Joseph Pignar, founded a theatrical troupe that toured the regions of France for twelve years before moving to Paris. During the fourteen years between the troupe's move to Paris and his death, Molière oversaw the presentation of more than one hundred plays, wrote, directed, and performed in dozens of them. This exquisite translation by Mohamed Badran and Mohamed Abdel Hafiz Moawad, which was published more than sixty years ago, is a profound lesson in translation that aims for fidelity to the original text and carefulness in highlighting the author's style and method in a fluent Arabic language, so that the reader does not feel they are reading a text in a language other than the original.