Burton Raffel

Burton Nathan Raffel (April 27, 1928 – September 29, 2015) was an American writer, translator, poet and professor. He is best known for his vigorous translation of '' Beowulf'', still widely used in universities, colleges and high schools. Other important translations include Miguel de Cervantes' ''Don Quixote'', ''Poems and Prose from the Old English'', ''The Voice of the Night: Complete Poetry and Prose of Chairil Anwar'', ''The Essential Horace'', Rabelais' ''Gargantua and Pantagruel'' and Dante's ''The Divine Comedy''.

Biography

Raffel was born in New York City in 1928. An alumnus of James Madison High School in Brooklyn, New York (1944), Raffel was educated at Brooklyn College (B.A., 1948), Ohio State University (M.A., 1949), and Yale Law School ( J.D., 1958). As a Ford Foundation fellow, Raffel taught English in Makassar, Indonesia, from 1953 to 1955. Following the completion of his legal studies and admission to the New York State Bar in 1959, Raffel practiced law as an associate at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy before deciding that he was not suited to practice law. Between 1960 and 1963, he served as founding editor of ''Foundation News'', a trade journal published by the Council on Foundations.

He taught at Brooklyn College (lecturer in English, 1950–51), Stony Brook University (instructor of English, 1964–65; assistant professor of English, 1965–66), the University at Buffalo (associate professor of English, 1966–68), the University of Haifa (visiting professor of English, 1968–69), the University of Texas at Austin (visiting professor of English, 1969–70; professor of English and classics and chair of the graduate program in comparative literature, 1970–71), the Ontario College of Art (senior tutor, 1971–72), York University, Toronto (visiting professor of humanities, 1972–75), Emory University (visiting professor, spring 1974) and the University of Denver (professor of English, 1975–89).

From 1989 until his death, he held the Chair in Humanities at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, ultimately retiring from active service as distinguished professor emeritus of arts and humanities and professor emeritus of English in 2003.

Raffel died on September 29, 2015 at the age of 87.

Translations

He translated many poems, including the Anglo-Saxon epic '' Beowulf'', poems by Horace, and ''Gargantua and Pantagruel'' by François Rabelais. In 1964, Raffel recorded an album along with Robert P. Creed, on Folkways Records entitled ''Lyrics from the Old English.'' In 1996, he published his translation of Miguel de Cervantes' ''Don Quixote'', which has been acclaimed for making Cervantes more accessible to the modern generation. In 2006, Yale University Press published his new translation of the Nibelungenlied. Among his many edited and translated publications are ''Poems and Prose from the Old English'', and Chrétien de Troyes' ''Cligès'', ''Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart'', ''Perceval, the Story of the Grail'', ''Erec and Enide'', and ''Yvain, the Knight of the Lion''.

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

Raffel's main contribution to translation theory was the principle of "syntactic tracking", which he championed in a monograph published in 1994. According to this theory, a good translation of a prose literary text should track the syntax of the original element-by-element, never joining sentences where the original separated them, never splitting a long sentence, never rearranging the order of ideas. The accuracy of tracking is measured syntactically by counting punctuation marks: the best translation will be the one which comes closest to the original in a statistical analysis of commas, colons and full stops. Raffel claimed that those translators who heed the syntax also make the best lexical choices, so that tracking becomes a measure not only of syntactic accuracy but of translating skills per se. This principle has since been applied in scholarly studies of translations of classical and modern works.For example: Steven J. Willett, "Thucydides Domesticated and 'Foreignized'". In: Arion 7,2 (1999), 118–145; Graeme Dunphy, "Tracking Christa Wolf: Problembewältigung und syntaktische Präzision in der englischen und französischen Übersetzung von Kindheitsmuster", in Michael Neecke & Lu Jiang, ''Unübersetzbar? Zur Kritik der literarischen Übersetzung'', Hamburg 2013, 35–60.

''Beowulf'' translation

Raffel's 1963 ''Beowulf'' has been described by Hugh Magennis as "an extremely free imitative verse", at the cost of often misrepresenting the poem. Magennis calls it highly accessible and readable, using alliteration lightly, and creating a "vivid and exciting narrative concerned with heroic exploits ... in a way that he modern readercan understand and appreciate. Clarity, logic and progression are hallmarks of this treatment of narrative in Raffel's translation, producing a satisfying impression of narrative connectedness".

Literary production

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

Bibliography

Translations

* ''Beowulf: A New Translation with an Introduction by Burton Raffel'', 1963, Mentor Books/New American Library
* ''Introduction to Poetry'', 1971, Mentor Books/New American Library
* ''Sir Gawain and the Green Knight'' (New York: New American Library ignet Classics 2009) . Translated with a preface by Burton Raffel.

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 Will Do", "Perfect Prescription", "Paradise Lost, Book 3, 912", "The Return of Borrowed Books", and "Looking at Pictures of the Lodz Ghetto", poems, in ''The Paris Review'' 156
* "Freshman Decomposition", in ''Palo Alto Review'', Fall 2001

Research

* "The Genetics of Speech", in Western Humanities Review, Fall 2001
* "Shakespeare's Sonnets: Touchstone of the English Lyric Tradition", in ''Explorations in Renaissance Culture'', Spring 2001
* Review of Czeslaw Milosz, Milosz’s ABC’s, in ''The Washington Post Book World'', 25 March 2001
* Review of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, ''The Mistress of Spices'', in ''Bas Bleu'', Winter 2001
* "C. J. Cherryh's Fiction", in ''The Literary Review'' 44.3 (2001)
* "Three Prize-Winning Poets", in ''The Literary Review'' 44.4 (2001)
* "Beethoven, Monet, Technology and Us", in ''The Pushcart Prize'' xxvi (2002)

References

External links

''Lyrics from the Old English: A Reading by Burton Raffel and Robert P. Creed'' Album Details
at Smithsonian Folkways

{{DEFAULTSORT:Raffel, Burton
1928 births
American academics of English literature
20th-century American poets
American translators
Arthurian scholars
2015 deaths
Translators from Old English
University of Louisiana at Lafayette faculty
20th-century translators
American male poets
Ford Foundation fellowships
James Madison High School (Brooklyn) alumni
American male non-fiction writers
People associated with Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy
Brooklyn College alumni
Translators of Don Quixote
Translators of Dante Alighieri
American expatriates in Indonesia
American expatriates in Israel
American expatriates in Canada
20th-century American male writers