Burton Raffel

Who is Burton Raffel?

Burton Raffel is a translator, a poet and a teacher. He has 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 is also a poet in his own right; over the years he has 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.

An alumnus of James Madison High School in Brooklyn, New York, Raffel was educated at Brooklyn College, Ohio State University, and Yale Law School. As a Ford Foundation fellow, Raffel taught English in Makassar, Indonesia from 1953 to 1955; from 1958 to 1960, Raffel was employed as an associate by Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy. Since 2003, he has been Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Arts and Humanities and professor emeritus of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he has taught since 1989. Previously, he taught at Brooklyn College, Stony Brook University, the University at Buffalo, the University of Texas at Austin, the Ontario College of Art, York University, and the University of Denver.