Before there was Game of Thrones, there was Beowulf...

SONG OF BATTLE AND KINGS

Beowulf is one of the earliest extant poems in a modern European language, composed in England before the Norman Conquest. As a social document this great epic poem is invaluable--reflecting a feudal world of heroes and monsters, blood and victory, life and death. As a work of art, it is unique. Beowulf rings with beauty, power, and artistry that have kept it alive for a thousand years. The noble simplicity of Beowulf's anonymous Anglo-Saxon singer is recaptured in this vivid translation by Burton Raffel.

Translated and with an Introduction by Burton Raffel
and an Afterword by Roberta Frank

THE INSPIRATION FOR THE UPCOMING MAJOR MOTION PICTURE THE GREEN KNIGHT--STARRING DEV PATEL

An epic poem of honor and bravery written by an anonymous fourteenth-century poet, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is recognized as an equal of Chaucer's masterworks and of the great Old English poems, including Beowulf.

It is Christmas in Camelot, and a truly royal feast has been laid out for King Arthur and his knights. And though there is plenty of good cheer to go around, the festivities hardly begin before a monstrous, axe-wielding, green-skinned knight barges in. He has come to see the famous Knights of the Round Table and offer them a simple but deadly challenge--a challenge taken on by the brave Sir Gawain--a challenge that will force him to choose between his honor and his life....

Includes a Preface by Burton Raffel
an Introduction by Brenda Webster
and an Afterword by Neil D. Isaacs

An introductory text that is both an anthology of over 200 poems and a comprehensive exploration of the form. Over 100 poets featured; those most widely represented include Blake, Byron, cummings, Dickinson, Donne, Alan Dugan, Frost, Louise Gluck, George Herbert, Keats, Pope, Pound, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Yeats.

Affordable, compact, and authoritative, this one-volume edition of The Annotated Milton encompasses the monumental sweep of John Milton's poetry. Here are Milton' s early works, including his first great poem, On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, the light and lyrical L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, the masque Comus, and the lushly beautiful pastoral elegy Lycidas. Here, too, included in their entirety, are the three epic poems considered to be among the finest works in the English language: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes.

Fully annotated by Burton Raffel, this distinguished edition clarifies the complex allusions of Milton's verse and references the personal, religious, historical, and mythical influences that inspired the great blind poet of England, who ranks among the undisputed giants of world literature.

Offers the complete body of work of one of the twentieth century's greatest Russian poets for the first time in English.

Osip Emilevich Mandelstam, the great twentieth-century Russian poet, was once thought to be buried forever in secret files and condemned to oblivion by official silence. Thanks to his widow, dedicated scholars, and the talented efforts of Burton Raffel and Alla Burago in this volume he takes his rightful and long-overdue place as the twentieth-century poet. Raffel and Burago provide the complete body of Mandelstam's poetry in English for the first time, and Sidney Monas offers notes to the poems that are designed to give readers access to their connection with the poet's life, thus providing a greater appreciation of his work. Monas has also written an introduction to the collection, which is a highly interesting and informative view of Mandelstam's personality as well as an examination of his poetic method. The book also features an appendix containing Monas's translations of two chapters from the Russian edition of Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoir of her life with her husband.

The best of American short fiction

Spanning over 100 years of literary history, here are 33 of the finest short stories by Washington Irving * Nathaniel Hawthorne * Edgar Allan Poe * Herman Melville * Harriet Beecher Stowe * Bret Harte * Bayard Taylor * Rose Terry Cooke * Ambrose Bierce * Hamlin Garland * Mary E. Wilkens Freeman * Henry James * Charlotte Perkins Gilman * Sarah Orne Jewett * Grace Elizabeth King * Harold Frederic * Kate Chopin * Stephen Crane * Edith Wharton * Mark Twain * Jack London * F. Hopkinson Smith * Zona Gale * O. Henry * Sherwood Anderson * Ernest Hemingway * John Dos Passos * Stephen Vincent Benet * Willa Cather * William Faulkner * James Thurber * F. Scott Fitzgerald * William Saroyan

This book by a well-known translator and critic is divided into two parts, the first dealing with the linguistic and other more technical aspects of translating poetry, the second involved with more practice-oriented matters. The chapters in Part One examine the specific constraints of language and the unavoidable linguistic bases of translation; the constraints of specific languages; forms and genres; and prosody and comparative prosody. Part Two looks at the subjective element in translation; collaborative translation; the translation of oral poetry; and the translator's responsibility.

Languages discussed include Indonesian, Japanese, Chinese, Old and Middle English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Persian, Russian, Latin, and Greek. The book argues, inter alia, that literal translation is impossible; that no translation can fully create the original but that good literary translation can create a usable approximation; that translation is secondary not only to the original work being translated but also to the linguistic (and literary) nature of the language being translated into; that the literary translator's primary responsibility is to the work he is translating; that there is nothing ever definitive about any translation; that the poetry translator must be a poet and poems should not be translated into prose; and that there must be a subjective identification between translator and translated work.

This is the first attempt to systematize linguistic information about the translation of poetry. It is also the first book to range widely over the languages and literatures of the past and the present, and European and Asian languages and literatures as well. Raffel is the first author to combine in one study linguistic and scholarly knowledge and extensive experience of translation.

A new verse translation of the great German epic poem that inspired Wagner's Ring Cycle and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings

No poem in German literature is so well known and studied in Germany and Europe as the 800-year-old Das Nibelungenlied. In the English-speaking world, however, the poem has remained little known, languishing without an adequate translation. This wonderful new translation by eminent translator Burton Raffel brings the epic poem to life in English for the first time, rendering it in verse that does full justice to the original High Middle German. His translation underscores the formal aspects of the poem and preserves its haunting beauty. Often called the German lliad, Das Nibelungenlied is a heroic epic both national in character and sweeping in scope. The poem moves inexorably from romance through tragedy to holocaust. It portrays the existential struggles and downfall of an entire people, the Burgundians, in a military conflict with the Huns and their king. In his foreword to the book, Michael Dirda observes that the story could be easily updated to describe the downfall of a Mafia crime family, something like The Godfather, with swords. The tremendous appeal of Das Nibelungenlied throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is reflected in such works as Richard Wagner's opera tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen, Fritz Lang's two-part film Die Nibelungen, and, more recently, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

AmericaA a¬a s war against itself developed slowly, pressing on people in all walks and ways of life. The Bingham familyA a¬aof New England, then rural New York, then the great city of New YorkA a¬awas, like everyone else, caught up in deep, churning passions. The Bingham men, as they struggle toward the lives and loves they long for, reach into realms of commerce, politics, diplomacy, journalism. Bingham women, almost too strong for the roles society imposes, strive to be as they see themselves. Though fictive, their stories are historical reincarnations, since Yankee Doric mirrors faithfully the age and its people.

In this restructured and greatly expanded version of Burton Raffel's out-of-print classic, Poems from the Old English, Raffel and co-editor Alexandra H. Olsen place the oldest English writings in an entirely different perspective. Keeping the classroom teacher's needs foremost in mind, Raffel and Olsen organize the major old English poems (except Beowulf) and new prose selections so as to facilitate both reading and studying. A general introduction provides an up-to-date and detailed historical account of the Anglo-Saxon period, and concise introductions open the literature sections of the book and many of the translations.

Raffel's masterly translations of Old English poetry, praised as fine poems in their own right, reproduce much of the flavor as well as the sense of the originals. With more than 1800 newly translated lines and many revised older translations, the poems in this volume are organized into four genres--elegies, heroic poems, religious poems, and wisdom poetry. Raffel's new translations include more than twenty poem-riddles, with proposed solutions in a separate section. Prose translations--grouped in historical, testamentary and legal, religious, social and instructional, and medical and magical categories--feature writings by King Alfred, Aelfric, and Wulfstan, among others.

Beowulf is the conventional title of an Old English heroic epic poem consisting of 3182 alliterative long lines, set in Scandinavia, commonly cited as one of the most important works of Anglo-Saxon literature. It survives in a single manuscript known as the Nowell Codex. Its composition by an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet is dated between the 8th and the early 11th century.

In Beethoven in Denver and Other Poems, Burton Raffel brings a lifetime of artistry to an enchanting and visionary story, followed by a sequence of jewel-like lyrics. In the title poem, set during Raffel's time as a Professor of English at Denver Univeristy, Beethoven returns from the dead and moves in with Raffel for extended conversations on music, politics, women, history, chocolate, mountains, love and God. According to the narrator, the composer returns because Beethoven would risk anything, but it is Raffel who has dared to imagine this magical, whimsical and inspired dialogue, forging anew the character of Romantic inspiration. Over the course of the poem, Beethoven emerges as both ordinary adn supernatural, naive yet eternal, vulgar and divine. Filled both with creative joy and the acknowledment of death, Beethoven in Denver and Other Poems stands as a major and mature work by one of the gifted poets of our time.

There has been very little linguistically sound discussion of the differences between poetry and prose, and virtually no discussion of any sort of the practical consequences of those differences for the translation of prose. The Art of Translating Prose presents for both the specialist and nonspecialist the core strategies employed by the author in translating a variety of important prose texts, and in the process delineates a coherent program or theory that can inform each act of translation. Burton Raffel considers and effectively illustrates the fundamental features of prose, those features that most clearly and idiomatically define an author's style. He addresses those features that must be attended closely and imaginatively as one moves them from the original-language work. Raffel's insistence on concentrating on the artistic viability of the translation continues themes he explored in other books, most notably The Forked Tongue and The Art of Translating Poetry. Raffel finds the most important determinant--for prose, though not for poetry--to be syntax, which he argues must be tracked if the translation is to reflect the original author's style in a meaningful way. Raffel ties together theory and practice to establish sound standards for the evaluation of prose translations, and he provides examples in considerations of versions of such books as Madame Bovary, Germinal, and Death in Venice.

Basic human drives--curiosity, passion, the need to provide shape and structure, the excitement of discovery--underlie all human creativity. Different minds and sensibilities necessarily focus on different aspects of human experience. However, in our educational systems and professional lives, we give undue and untrue emphasis to our differences rather than to our similarities. In Artists All Burton Raffel demonstrates that the creative force in the natural and social sciences is essentially the same as the creative energies of the arts; that the arts and aesthetic experiences frequently inspire insight in scientists and sociologist; that the arts themselves, though mutually untranslatable, share a deep unity; that disciplinary boundaries and divisions can frequently stunt creativity; that what we chose to call artistic creativity is nothing more or less than the heightened engagement of human beings with themselves, their fellows, and their environment; and that there is always a link between what artists produce and their stance toward their society's place and posture in the world.

When used to define intellectual disciplines, the very word Interdisciplinary is a misnomer, almost a contradiction in terms, Raffel contends, because it implies boundaries rather than interconnectedness and interrelationships. Since it is his own primary concern, Raffel uses literature as a touchstone, analyzing its relationships with social science, natural science, music, and the visual arts. He then provides practical recommendations, addressed to the academic community as a whole, about ways of restructuring universities to reflect functioning interdisciplinary realities rather than convenient but artificial and seriously constrictive disciplinary boundaries. Written with humor and sensitivity, Artists All makes a significant contribution to current thinking about higher education.