How Did Moliere Put It? : Stage: Former Poet Laureate Richard Wilbur brings his latest translation of the French playwright to the Old Globe in San Diego.

Poets and novelists have historically looked down on the crass art of writing for the stage, considering it an easy task geared to the masses. Until, that is, they try it themselves.

Poet Robert Browning and novelist Henry James “ran a dead heat in failed playwrighting,” notes poet Richard Wilbur.

Wilbur, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and 1987 Poet Laureate of the United States, also attempted a play of his own once--only to discard it as not worth pursuing.

Since then, he has taken occasional breaks from his main business of poetry to establish a second career as a translator of other playwrights.

Wilbur, 70, may be best known in theatrical circles for writing the lyrics to the musical “Candide” in 1956. (The show didn’t gain popular acceptance until Harold Prince revised and revived it in 1974.)

Since he tackled his first Moliere play 40 years ago, Wilbur has quietly but surely built an impressive and enduring reputation for himself as the country’s most esteemed translator of Moliere and Racine.

The world premiere of his latest translation, Moliere’s “The School for Husbands,” is currently at the Old Globe Theatre. The entire text is written in rhymed iambic pentameter. The show is preceded by another, brief Moliere work, “The Flying Doctor,” translated by Albert Bermel.

As befits a much-decorated and honored poet, Wilbur is motivated not by commission but by inspiration. He translates only what he feels moved to, and somehow--seemingly without much effort on his part--the works are produced.

“When I first started doing Moliere back in the early 1950s, I didn’t think of the stage at all,” said Wilbur, mannerly but warm and often funny in a phone interview from his home in Key West, Fla. (He also has a home in Cummington, Mass.) “I thought I was producing a good reading version in English for people who didn’t happen to have French.

“Then it just happened that the play fell into the hands of the Poet’s Theatre of Cambridge, and they proved very quickly that American audiences can adjust to poetry in rhyme and meter.”

“The School for Husbands” tells the story of two brothers, one 20 years older than the other, who are rearing two girls, as wards, whom they plan to marry. The older brother, who is indulgent and kind, wins the devotion of his fiancee. The younger, a stiff-necked, reactionary bully, encounters resistance from his intended.

As a maid says to him:

We owe fidelity to them that trust us/

But cheating folk like you is simple justice.

This is not simply a case of good guys versus bad guys.

“I feel affection for all of them, including the crank,” Wilbur said of the characters in Moliere’s work.

The 17th-Century French playwright was “not really a cruel and satirical writer. What he does in play after play is show you someone who has an awful and deforming quirk which makes him behave badly to himself and all those around him. In so far as there is any lesson in the play, it is that it won’t do to be a crank, to try to manipulate life and try to control everything.”

“He values order and good sense, but not rigor,” Wilbur said.

Although Richard Purdy Wilbur did not know from an early age that he would become a poet, he always believed he was destined for a life in the arts.

His mother came from a long line of journalists, and his father was a painter. Wilbur would later write a poem about him, “My Father Paints the Summer,” praising him for disregarding an actual rain to paint a summer from his imagination.

Then, at the age of 8, Wilbur sent a poem to a children’s magazine, John Martin’s Book. The magazine sent him a dollar for it, which he still has “pressed between the pages of some book.”

As for the poem itself, “I simply won’t recite it because it was too horrible,” he said with a laugh.

Despite that heady experience, Wilbur still did not settle on a life in poetry. As editor of his high school and college (Amherst) newspapers, he had “all kinds of notions of what I might end up doing”--the most prominent ideas being newspaperman, political cartoonist or comic strip writer.

“I had rather complex and scattered ambitions,” as he puts it.

In the end it was the Army that made a poet out of Wilbur.

He served overseas with the 36th Texas Infantry Division during World War II, traveling from Italy to Germany.

“In the course of my several years of combat, I wasn’t in a position to practice any other art than poetry,” Wilbur said. “So I sat around in foxholes writing poems, and, by the time I was finished with World War II, I had worked on a lot of poetry. A good many of them were about war, and there were some poems about politics as I then understood them. It wasn’t surprising that I had a book as early as 1947.”

The poems, of course, did more than pass the time. They helped Wilbur make sense of a world in crisis.

“A large part of what poetry does is help people to know what it is that they feel,” he said. “It helps them feel. And, if you’re writing your poetry at any kind of psychological depth, what you do discover about yourself is likely to be true about everyone in general.”

It was also during those years that Wilbur began to explore his lifelong belief in the power that is unleashed by the precise use of language.

“I think you can’t know what it is you think or feel until you find the exact word for it,” he said. “The impulse to poetry may begin in a vague way, but it’s a process of sharpening. Before you’re through, you hope to find just the right words for yourself and the reader.”

After the war, Wilbur attended Harvard University to study for a master’s degree in English--work that prepared him to spend much of his life as a professor, including stints at Harvard and Wesleyan, before retiring in 1986.

In 1948, Wilbur and his wife, Mary, (whom he thanks in the introduction to “The School for Husbands”) visited Paris to explore the possibility of translating French works, beginning for him what would become a lifelong love for Moliere.

“We saw ‘The Misanthrope,’ and it was a splendidly mounted production,” recalled Wilbur, a man who is precise with his words even in casual conversation.

He was enthralled by what he called “the richness of the comedy. It’s a comedy which is very close to tragedy. It’s complex emotionally.”

Wilbur tackled a translation of “The Misanthrope” in 1952, followed by “Tartuffe” in 1963. He later translated Moliere’s “The School for Wives” in 1971 and “The Learned Ladies” in 1978.

The translating, he found, sometimes complemented his own poetry.

“I think Moliere may have made me more colloquial, because I spent so much time trying to figure out how to translate lines that an actor would like to speak,” he said. “I wrote more and more poems in which individual voices have their say. I’ve enjoyed it enormously, and I think I feel my poetry has profited from it.”

Still, there are doubts.

“It’s easy to favor translating over doing your own work,” Wilbur said. “The translator leans on the play or text that he’s translating. He knows if he does a good job with it, it will be a good job to have done. Writing your own poems is more doubtful, and it’s harder.”

Wilbur works at his translations in longhand, with a dictionary at his elbow and other reference books nearby. The work comes slowly. His previous Moliere translations took three years each; this one took two. Wilbur jokes that he’s getting faster.

“It is a solitary and slow business. It calls for the temperament of the crossword puzzle solver. And I do like them (crossword puzzles), especially the nasty London Times kind.”

The trick, he said, is to lose himself and let the playwright come through.

“One tries for the greatest possible faithfulness,” Wilbur said. “You can sit in a chair in the sun for half a day hoping to write two lines of a translation. You just have to wait, and ultimately the rhymes and the jokes and the precise words will come to you.

“It’s been a delight, but a hard delight. The main thing I boast of is patience,” he said.

With all the high points in his life--the 1957 Pulitzer, the ’89 Pulitzer and the Poet Laureate honor--his long association with Moliere ranks at the top.

“A lot of the high moments, the moments when I was most pleased, have had to do with productions of Moliere,” Wilbur said.

Part of the pleasure, he said, is in hearing an audience react to his work, a sensation not normally afforded a solitary poet.

“It’s immensely gratifying,” Wilbur said. “It’s gratifying to translate a play where you can see the audience laugh.

“It makes me laugh twice as hard.”

Performances of “The School for Husbands,” preceded by “The Flying Doctor,” are at 8 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and 7 p.m. Sunday, with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. through March 1. Tickets are $17-$29.50. At the Old Globe Theatre, Balboa Park. Call 239-2255.