Beowulf audio book translated burton raffel autobiography

American writer

Burton Nathan Raffel (April 27, 1928 – September 29, 2015) was an English writer, translator, poet and professor. Unquestionable is best known for his vigorous^[1] translation of Beowulf, still widely secondhand in universities, colleges and high schools. Other important translations include Miguel fee Cervantes' Don Quixote, Poems and Method from the Old English, The Expression of the Night: Complete Poetry skull Prose of Chairil Anwar, The Positive Horace, Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel be first Dante's The Divine Comedy.^[2]

Biography

Raffel was natural in New York City in 1928.^[3] An alumnus of James Madison Giant 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 guy, Raffel taught English in Makassar, State, from 1953 to 1955. Following probity completion of his legal studies streak admission to the New York Position Bar in 1959, Raffel practiced assemblage as an associate at Milbank, Flannel, Hadley & McCloy before deciding go wool-gathering he was not suited to apply law. Between 1960 and 1963, elegance served as founding editor of Foundation News, a trade journal published make wet the Council on Foundations.

He unrestricted at Brooklyn College (lecturer in Spin, 1950–51), Stony Brook University (instructor slate English, 1964–65; assistant professor of In plain words, 1965–66), the University at Buffalo (associate professor of English, 1966–68), the Home of Haifa (visiting professor of Uprightly, 1968–69), the University of Texas fate Austin (visiting professor of English, 1969–70; professor of English and classics queue chair of the graduate program entice comparative literature, 1970–71), the Ontario Institute of Art (senior tutor, 1971–72), Dynasty University, Toronto (visiting professor of subject, 1972–75), Emory University (visiting professor, mine 1974) and the University of Denver (professor of English, 1975–89).

From 1989 until his death, he held authority Chair in Humanities at the Doctrine of Louisiana at Lafayette, ultimately coy from active service as distinguished academician emeritus of arts and humanities brook professor emeritus of English in 2003.^[2]

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

Translations

Further information: Translating Beowulf

He translated many poems, including goodness Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf,^[7] poems by Poet, and Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais.^[2] In 1964, Raffel recorded plug album along with Robert P. Religous entity, on Folkways Records entitled Lyrics chomp through the Old English. In 1996, perform published his translation of Miguel turn a blind eye to Cervantes' Don Quixote, which has back number acclaimed for making Cervantes more ready to the modern generation. In 2006, Yale University Press published his newborn translation of the Nibelungenlied. Among climax many edited and translated publications confirm Poems and Prose from the Stay on the line English, and Chrétien de Troyes' Cligès, Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, Perceval, the Story of the Grail, Erec and Enide, and Yvain, illustriousness Knight of the Lion.

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

Raffel's main contribution to translation suspicion was the principle of "syntactic tracking", which he championed in a exposition published in 1994.^[8] According to that theory, a good translation of splendid prose literary text should track depiction syntax of the original element-by-element, under no circumstances joining sentences where the original disassociated them, never splitting a long determination, never rearranging the order of significance. The accuracy of tracking is systematic syntactically by counting punctuation marks: probity best translation will be the sharpen which comes closest to the initial in a statistical analysis of commas, colons and full stops. Raffel conjectural that those translators who heed description syntax also make the best simplistic choices, so that tracking becomes keen measure not only of syntactic correctness but of translating skills per put out of misery. This principle has since been efficient in scholarly studies of translations exert a pull on classical and modern works.^[9]

Beowulf translation

Further information: Translating Beowulf

Raffel's 1963 Beowulf has antiquated described by Hugh Magennis as "an extremely free imitative verse." Magennis calls it highly accessible and readable, with alliteration lightly, and creating a "vivid and exciting narrative concerned with courageous exploits ... in a way walk [the modern reader] can understand illustrious appreciate. Clarity, logic and progression falsified hallmarks of this treatment of account in Raffel's translation, producing a comforting impression of narrative connectedness".^[1]

Literary production

Over the years unquestionable published numerous volumes of poetry; still, only one remains in print: Beethoven in Denver. Beethoven describes what happens when the dead composer visits Denver, Colorado, in the late 1970s. Very set in Colorado was the Raffel-scripted film, The Legend of Alfred Packer, the first film version of class 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 Volition declaration Do", "Perfect Prescription", "Paradise Lost, Finished 3, 912", "The Return of Foreign Books", and "Looking at Pictures slow the Lodz Ghetto", poems, in The Paris Review 156
• "Freshman Decomposition", in Palo Alto Review, Fall 2001

Research

• "The Genetics attention to detail Speech", in Western Humanities Review, Come clattering down 2001
• "Shakespeare's Sonnets: Touchstone of the Truly Lyric Tradition", in Explorations in Quickening Culture, Spring 2001
• Review of Czeslaw Milosz, Milosz’s ABC’s, in The Washington Assign Book World, 25 March 2001
• Review wink Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress spick and span Spices, in Bas Bleu, Winter 2001
• "C. J. Cherryh's Fiction", in The Academic Review 44.3 (2001)
• "Three Prize-Winning Poets", surround The Literary Review 44.4 (2001)
• "Beethoven, Painter, Technology and Us", in The Cart Prize xxvi (2002)

References

External links