Burton Raffel
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Burton Raffel (1930-) 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 1996, he published his translation of Cervantes's 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, Cligès, Lancelot, Perceval, Erec and Enide, and Yvain. Raffel is also a poet in his own right; over the years he has published numerous volumes of it but only one remains in print: Beethoven in Denver. Beethoven is about what happens when the dead composer visits Denver, Colorado in the late 1970s. Burton Raffel was the Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Arts and Humanities and emeritus professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette until 2005.
Raffel is currently working with Yale Press on a series of 12 annotated Shakespeare plays.
