The epic poem of honor and bravery
Written by an anonymous fourteenth-century poet, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" is recognized as an equal to Chaucer's masterworks and to the great Old English poems, "Beowulf" included. A green-skinned knight offers the Knights of the Round Table 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...

@GawainsWorld So listen here, some green man came to the hall and wants someone to cut his head off. Some sort of dare? Could be fun, right?
The deal is I cut off his head now, and he cuts off mine a year later. What a jester, doesn't he know he'll be dead?
This goblin fellow is totally dead.
All seemed fine until Ichabod Crane here fell to the floor, stood up, and picked up his head. His head, in his hands. In HIS HANDS
From "Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less"

The Annotated Shakespeare Series allowsreaders to fully understand and enjoy the rich plays of the world's greatest dramatist "If any work deserves a student's closest attention, it is Hamlet. Burton Raffel's fully annotated edition is a teacher's and student's dream: the words are fully explained, and they get a wonderful essay by Harold Bloom as well."-George Soule, Carleton College One of the most frequently read and performed of all stage works, Shakespeare's Hamlet isunsurpassed in its complexity and richness. Now the first fully annotated version of Hamlet makesthe play completely accessible to readers in the twenty-first century. It has been carefully assembled with students, teachers, and the general reader in mind. Eminent linguist and translator Burton Raffel offers generous help with vocabulary and usage of Elizabethan English, pronunciation, prosody, and alternative readings of phrases and lines. His on-page annotations provide readers with all the tools they need to comprehend the play and begin to explore its many possible interpretations. This version of Hamlet isunparalleled for its thoroughness and adherence to sound linguistic principles. In his Introduction, Raffel offers important background on the origins and previous versions of the Hamlet story, along with an analysis of the characters Hamlet and Ophelia. And in a concluding essay, Harold Bloom meditates on the originality of Shakespeare's achievement. The book also includes a careful selection of items for "Further Reading."

Kept alive for more than 13 centuries, "Beowulf" is the earliest extant poem in a modern European language, reflecting a feudal, newly Christian world of heroes and monsters, blood and victory, life and death. This edition of Raffel's acclaimed translation features a new Afterword. Revised reissue.

One of the finest of epic poems, and the only one to have survived from medieval Spain, "The Song of the Cid" recounts the adventures of the warlord and nobleman Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar both - 'Mio Cid'. A forceful combination of heroic fiction and historical fact, the tale seethes with the restless, adventurous spirit of Castile, telling of the Cid's unjust banishment from the court of King Alfonso, his victorious campaigns in Valencia and the crowning of his daughters as queens of Aragon and Navarre - the high point of his career as a warmonger. An epic that sings of universal human values, this is one of the greatest of all works of Spanish literature.

"Twelfth Night" is one of Shakespeare's funniest plays and also one of his most romantic. A young noblewoman, Viola, shipwrecked in a foreign land and separated from her twin brother, dresses as a man in order to enter the service of Orsino, duke of Illyria. Complications ensue--deceptions, infatuations, misdirected overtures, malevolent pranks--as everyone is drawn into the hilarious confusion.

In this lively comedy of love and money in sixteenth-century Venice, Bassanio wants to impress the wealthy heiress Portia but lacks the necessary funds. He turns to his merchant friend, Antonio, who is forced to borrow from Shylock, a Jewish moneylender. When Antonio's business falters, repayment becomes impossible--and by the terms of the loan agreement, Shylock is able to demand a pound of Antonio's flesh. Portia cleverly intervenes, and all ends well (except of course for Shylock).

The twelfth-century French poet Chretien de Troyes is a major figure in European literature. His courtly romances fathered the Arthurian tradition and influenced countless other poets in England as well as on the continent. Yet because of the difficulty of capturing his swift-moving style in translation, English-speaking audiences are largely unfamiliar with the pleasures of reading his poems. Now, for the first time, an experienced translator of medieval verse who is himself a poet provides a translation of Chretien's major poem, Yvain, in verse that fully and satisfyingly captures the movement, the sense, and the spirit of the Old French original. Yvain is a courtly romance with a moral tenor; it is ironic and sometimes bawdy; the poetry is crisp and vivid. In addition, the psychological and the socio-historical perceptions of the poem are of profound literary and historical importance, for it evokes the emotions and the values of a flourishing, vibrant medieval past.

Beyond its importance as a literary work of unvarnished genius, Geoffrey Chaucer's unfinished epic poem is also one of the most beloved works in the English language-and for good reason: It is lively, absorbing, perceptive, and outrageously funny. But despite the brilliance of Chaucer's work, the continual evolution of our language has rendered his words unfamiliar to many of us. Esteemed poet, translator, and scholar Burton Raffel's magnificent new unabridged translation brings Chaucer's poetry back to life, ensuring that none of the original's wit, wisdom, or humanity is lost to the modern reader. This Modern Library edition also features an Introduction by the widely influential medievalist and author John Miles Foley that discusses Chaucer's work as well as his life and times.

French poet and critic Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux (1636-1711) was by turns venerated (in the eighteenth century) and reviled (in the nineteenth century) as the lawgiver of French classicism. Today critics see his achievement as more varied and complex than the label of classicism generally allows. This selection of Boileau's poems, translated with spirit and carefully annotated by Burton Raffel, brings the work of Boileau to English-speaking readers for the first time in a generation. Much admired for his wit and ingenuity, Boileau perceived the role of the satirist as the scourge of bad writing and delighted in the notion of "l'ami du vrai," the brash truth-teller and enemy of humbug, inflation, and equivocation. Raffel's translations, vigorous and engaging, preserve the meaning of Boileau's poems and invite today's reader to enjoy the poet's astute perceptions. Julia Prest's insightful introduction to the volume provides an overview of Boileau's life and achievement.

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 this extraordinarily fine translation of Cliges, the second of five surviving Arthurian poems by twelfth-century French poet Chretien de Troyes, Burton Raffel captures the liveliness, innovative spirit, and subtle intentions of the original work. In this poem, Chretien creates his most artful plot and paints the most starkly medieval portraits of any of his romances. The world he describes has few of the safeguards and protections of civilization: battles are brutal and merciless, love is anguished and desperate. Cliges tells the story of the unhappy Fenice, trapped in a marriage of constraint to the emperor of Constantinople. Fenice feigns death, then awakens to a new, happy life with her lover.

Enormously popular in their own time, each of Chretien's great verse romances is a fast-paced psychologically oriented narrative. In a rational and realistic manner, Chretien probes the inner workings of his characters and the world they live in, evoking the people, their customs, and their values in clear, emotionally charged verse. Cliges is filled with Chretien's barbs and bawdiness, his humor and his pleasure, his affection and his contempt. It is the unmistakable work of a brilliantly individualistic poet, brought to modern English readers by Raffel's poetic translation in a metric form invented specifically to reflect Chretien's narrative speed and tone.

Erec and Enide, the first of five surviving Arthurian romantic poems by twelfth-century French poet Chretien de Troyes, narrates a vivid chapter from the legend of King Arthur. Chretien's romances became the source for Arthurian tradition and influenced countless other poets in England and on the Continent. Yet his swift-moving style is difficult to capture in translation, and today's English-speaking audiences remain largely unfamiliar with the pleasures of reading his poems. Now an experienced translator of medieval verse who is himself a poet has translated Eric and Enide in an original three-stress metric verse form that fully captures the movement, the sense, and the spirit of the Old French original. Burton Raffel's rendition preserves the subtlety and charm of a poem that is in turn serious, dramatic, bawdy, merry, and satiric. Erec and Enide tells the story of Erec, a knight at King Arthur's court, whose retirement to domestic bliss with his beautiful new wife Enide takes him away from his chivalric duties. To regain his knightly honor, Erec sets out with Enide on a series of amazing adventures. Eric dispatches thieves and giants with prodigious strength and valor but treats his wife rather harshly for doubting his abilities. When Enide is kidnapped by a robber baron, Erec revives from near-death to perform a courageous rescue, and at length the two are reconciled.

A masterful new translation that comes as close as possible to re-creating the inimitable style of Cervantes' prose.

One of the world's great novels, Don Quijote chronicles the adventures of that bumbling, infinitely compassionate knight and his shrewdly simple squire, Sancho Panza, in all their splendid humor.

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.

Translated by Burton Raffel

Biting and bawdy, smart and smutty, lofty and low, Gargantua and Pantagruel is fantasy on the grandest of scales, told with an unquenchable thirst for all of human experience. Rabelais's vigorous examination of the life of his times—from bizarre battles to great drinking bouts, from satire on religion and education to matter-of-fact descriptions of bodily functions and desires—is one of the great comic masterpieces of literature.

Parts of Gargantua and Pantagruel were banned upon their publication, and the whole of it has suffered in our century at the hands of translators too timid to say in modern English what Rabelais so frankly wrote in Middle French. Master translator Burton Raffel unapologetically brings to life in today's American idiom all the gusto of Rabelais's language. Raffel succeeds in making Gargantua and Pantagruel, so long a great unread classic, accessible and alive to the contemporary reader.

"Grand to see this new rendition of a work full of what life is all about and translated with an equal authenticity." —J. P. Donleavy

"Raffel has done the impossible. . . . [He] has produced a text which is amazingly true to the meaning and the linguistic gusto of the original." —Alain Renoir

"[Raffel] has provided us with a classic work, restored to its original complexity, humor, and gusto." —Library Journal

The romantic poems of twelfth-century French poet Chretien de Troyes were of immense influence across Europe -- widely imitated, translated, and adapted. Giving rise to a tradition of story-telling that continues to this day, the poems established the shape of the nascent Arthurian legend. In this outstanding new translation of Lancelot, Burton Raffel brings to English-language readers the fourth of Chretien's five surviving romantic Arthurian poems. This poem was the first to introduce Lancelot as an important figure in the King Arthur legend.

Lancelot tells of the adulterous relationship between the knight and his mistress, Guinevere, the wife of King Arthur. Thematically this poem differs from Chretien's other romances -- Lancelot and Guinevere's love is a serious crime against their king, Lancelot casts aside his knightly ideals and reputation for the sake of his beloved, and Arthur is endowed with a weaker personality.

Raffel has created an original three-stress metric verse form that captures Chretien's swift-paced narrative and lively, sparkling Old French. A consummate translator, Raffel enables the modern reader and the reader who is unfamiliar with French to appreciate the beauty of Chretien's original.

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. Burton Raffel is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southwestern Louisiana and author of many books, including Artists All (Penn State, 1991) and The Art of Translating Poetry (Penn State, 1988). He is the translator of Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel (Norton, 1990), winner of the 1991 French-American Foundation Translation Prize; Balzac's Phre Goriot (Norton, 1994), and a forthcoming new version of Cervantes's Don Quijote.

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.

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.