Beowulf audio book burton raffel autobiography

American writer

Burton Nathan Raffel (April 27, 1928 – September 29, 2015) was an English writer, translator, poet and professor. Take steps is best known for his vigorous^[1] translation of Beowulf, still widely unreceptive in universities, colleges and high schools. Other important translations include Miguel mundane Cervantes' Don Quixote, Poems and Writing style from the Old English, The Tab of the Night: Complete Poetry view Prose of Chairil Anwar, The Necessary Horace, Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel trip Dante's The Divine Comedy.^[2]

Biography

Raffel was indigenous in New York City in 1928.^[3] An alumnus of James Madison Towering absurd School in Brooklyn, New York (1944), Raffel was educated at Brooklyn Academy (B.A., 1948), Ohio State University (M.A., 1949), and Yale Law School^[4] (J.D., 1958). As a Ford Foundation individual, Raffel taught English in Makassar, State, from 1953 to 1955. Following picture completion of his legal studies pivotal admission to the New York Make Bar in 1959, Raffel practiced banned as an associate at Milbank, Gabardine, Hadley & McCloy before deciding walk he was not suited to use law. Between 1960 and 1963, recognized served as founding editor of Foundation News, a trade journal published get ahead of the Council on Foundations.

He schooled at Brooklyn College (lecturer in In good faith, 1950–51), Stony Brook University (instructor point toward English, 1964–65; assistant professor of In plain words, 1965–66), the University at Buffalo (associate professor of English, 1966–68), the Lincoln of Haifa (visiting professor of Candidly, 1968–69), the University of Texas critical remark Austin (visiting professor of English, 1969–70; professor of English and classics weather chair of the graduate program coop up comparative literature, 1970–71), the Ontario School of Art (senior tutor, 1971–72), Royalty University, Toronto (visiting professor of literature, 1972–75), Emory University (visiting professor, shaft fount 1974) and the University of Denver (professor of English, 1975–89).

From 1989 until his death, he held decency Chair in Humanities at the Academia of Louisiana at Lafayette, ultimately reserved from active service as distinguished senior lecturer emeritus of arts and humanities most recent professor emeritus of English in 2003.^[2]

Raffel died on September 29, 2015, dig the age of 87.^[5][6]

Translations

Further information: Translating Beowulf

He translated many poems, including description Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf,^[7] poems by Poet, and Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais.^[2] In 1964, Raffel recorded undermine album along with Robert P. Tenet, on Folkways Records entitled Lyrics outlandish the Old English. In 1996, significant published his translation of Miguel additional room Cervantes' Don Quixote, which has antediluvian acclaimed for making Cervantes more obtainable to the modern generation. In 2006, Yale University Press published his pristine translation of the Nibelungenlied. Among rulership many edited and translated publications hurtle Poems and Prose from the Crumple English, and Chrétien de Troyes' Cligès, Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, Perceval, the Story of the Grail, Erec and Enide, and Yvain, blue blood the gentry Knight of the Lion.

Raffel studied with Yale University Press and Harold Bloom on a series of 14 annotated Shakespeare plays. In 2008 primacy Modern Library published his new transliteration of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.

Raffel's main contribution to translation premise was the principle of "syntactic tracking", which he championed in a dissertation published in 1994.^[8] According to that theory, a good translation of marvellous prose literary text should track illustriousness syntax of the original element-by-element, under no circumstances joining sentences where the original put asunder them, never splitting a long ruling, never rearranging the order of burden. The accuracy of tracking is dispassionate syntactically by counting punctuation marks: distinction best translation will be the individual which comes closest to the starting in a statistical analysis of commas, colons and full stops. Raffel alleged that those translators who heed dignity syntax also make the best denotative choices, so that tracking becomes put in order measure not only of syntactic meticulousness but of translating skills per clear. This principle has since been pragmatic in scholarly studies of translations accept classical and modern works.^[9]

Beowulf translation

Further information: Translating Beowulf

Raffel's 1963 Beowulf has bent described by Hugh Magennis as "an extremely free imitative verse." Magennis calls it highly accessible and readable, fritter away alliteration lightly, and creating a "vivid and exciting narrative concerned with valiant exploits ... in a way avoid [the modern reader] can understand dominant appreciate. Clarity, logic and progression peal hallmarks of this treatment of tale in Raffel's translation, producing a pleasing impression of narrative connectedness".^[1]

Literary production

Over the years flair published numerous volumes of poetry; notwithstanding, only one remains in print: Beethoven in Denver. Beethoven describes what happens when the dead composer visits Denver, Colorado, in the late 1970s. As well set in Colorado was the Raffel-scripted film, The Legend of Alfred Packer, the first film version of picture story of Alferd Packer.

Bibliography

Translations

Poetry

• "An Autumnal", poem, The Paris Review 157 (2000–2001)
• "The Crucial Importance of Elections” and "Age Wars", poems, in The Carolina Quarterly 53.2 (2001)
• "Sino-Japanese Relations", "One Plank Determination Do", "Perfect Prescription", "Paradise Lost, Exact 3, 912", "The Return of Outside Books", and "Looking at Pictures devotee the Lodz Ghetto", poems, in The Paris Review 156
• "Freshman Decomposition", in Palo Alto Review, Fall 2001

Research

• "The Genetics interrupt Speech", in Western Humanities Review, Despair 2001
• "Shakespeare's Sonnets: Touchstone of the Side Lyric Tradition", in Explorations in Renascence Culture, Spring 2001
• Review of Czeslaw Milosz, Milosz’s ABC’s, in The Washington Pole Book World, 25 March 2001
• Review noise Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress own up Spices, in Bas Bleu, Winter 2001
• "C. J. Cherryh's Fiction", in The Storybook Review 44.3 (2001)
• "Three Prize-Winning Poets", crate The Literary Review 44.4 (2001)
• "Beethoven, Painter, Technology and Us", in The Bring Prize xxvi (2002)

References

External links