The quote I put up the other day comes from this collection:
I'm just about to start the last story, Death in Venice. After running across Molière mentioned in a hundred places it finally dawned on me that I should read him. He is rather like a French Shakespeare, roughly a hundred years later. And he only wrote comedies. I like comedies. The thing is that, in this translation Richard Wilbur sticks as close as possible to the poetic structure of the original, which means hundreds of pages of rhymed couplets in iambic pentameter. It is particularly fun when they are split between different characters. Like Cher or Madonna, Molière goes by one name.
And finally, I have returned to The Histories of Herodotus in the marvelous Landmark edition:
I set this aside for a few months, but I am glad to be back. Herodotus is the source of lots of delightful stories. For example, a Persian lord, in order to send a message with complete secrecy had a courier's head shaved and the message tattooed on his scalp. The he grew the hair back. He simply carried the message "shave the head of this courier." Another story is of a man given an important message that said simply "kill this man."
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