Burton Raffel
| Burton Raffel | |
|---|---|
| Born |
April 27, 1928 New York City, New York |
| Died | September 29, 2015 (aged 87) Lafayette, Louisiana |
| Occupation | Writer, translator |
| Nationality | American |
Burton Nathan Raffel (April 27, 1928 – September 29, 2015) was a translator, a poet and a teacher. 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 was also a poet in his own right; over the years he published numerous volumes of it; 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.
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 (LL.B., 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 was briefly employed as an associate by 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.
...
Wikipedia