Raffel was recently interviewed by Jim Engster on the public radio station in Baton Rouge. The topics were wide-ranging, including Raffel's life and writings, his teaching, his love of baseball--and, of course, Yankee Doric. Here's the URL for the NPR podcast:
Friday, December 31, 2010
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
From the Monroe (LA) News-Star ...
Burton Raffel of Lafayette could be described as the preeminent translator of epic works today — his translation of Beowulf has sold more than a million copies. The author of 100 books as a poet, literary critic and editor has just translated The Divine Comedy by Northwestern World Classics and the book commands awe. This fall, Raffel published his first novel, a historical examination of American life titled Yankee Doric: America Before the Civil War. The book's a must for history lovers and arrives in perfect time for the Civil War sesquicentennial.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
What Writers and Readers Have Said . . .
What Writers and Readers Have Said about Yankee Doric
“Dramatizing the times of Jefferson, John Brown, and Horace Greeley, Yankee Doric recovers the feverish restlessness of a newly-formed nation growing from isolation to world position. Through a family’s search for meaning in the face of illness, infidelities, death, the vagaries of politics and the looming possibility of civil war, the novel presents a portrait of the young nation and its citizens. The language is so fine that details become images; giving scope to the national experience and stature to its characters, these images fuse into the ideas that created the United States of America and, still, enable it to endure.”
—Linda Ty-Casper, author of DreamEden and Awaiting Trespass
“[Yankee Doric] is an ambitious work, whose main characters embody a definitively American heroism, one embracing duty over love and self-sacrifice in the face of crisis. Chronicling the lives of the Bingham family and set in New York, Virginia, and Paris, the novel’s expansive world makes Yankee Doric an American epic in prose. The novel’s finely honed style invokes the ‘plain style’ of the age’s Federalist aesthetic, as symbolized by the classical Doric order of architecture.”
—Tita F. Baumlin, co-author of Perpetual Adolescence
“It arrived a few days ago and I've just now finished reading this fascinating philosophical/ psychological and very personal march through U.S. history. Beautifully written, as all your writings always are. And what a wealth of historical happenings you've gathered together! Congratulations!”
—H. R.
“Surveying American life during the decades before the Civil War, Yankee Doric will delight readers with graces of prose style reminiscent of the great novels of manners. Yet the delight serves as subtle cover for Raffel's knowing wit which, slyly, pries into both Northern and Southern life. Throughout, one hears the distant knells of impending national holocaust.”
—Donald Holliday, Missouri State University (Emeritus)
“It’s a gripping and thoroughly enjoyable novel. I like it a lot, [but] it is hard to leave the characters, especially when I don't know what will happen to Grace or Jonathan. [A] very enjoyable story. Thank you.
“It’s a gripping and thoroughly enjoyable novel. I like it a lot, [but] it is hard to leave the characters, especially when I don't know what will happen to Grace or Jonathan. [A] very enjoyable story. Thank you.
—A.J. Lafave, Jr., Vice-Chairman (Retired), IMG
“In Yankee Doric, Burton has captured not only the historical detail of an era, but also its voice and spirit. Readers will be transported back to an America still struggling to forge its identity. It’s a continuing struggle, and many of the issues that dominate the antebellum world of Yankee Doric still resonate today.”
“In Yankee Doric, Burton has captured not only the historical detail of an era, but also its voice and spirit. Readers will be transported back to an America still struggling to forge its identity. It’s a continuing struggle, and many of the issues that dominate the antebellum world of Yankee Doric still resonate today.”
—George Clark, author of The Raw Man and The Small Bees’ Honey
“Yankee Doric ends as the Confederacy is attacking Fort Sumter, and I, for one, would have wished it longer. ‘There will be war,’ one character foresees, but this elegant novel focuses on the decades before the Civil War, when merchants, poets, and abolitionists were making history. Raffel brings to life the impact on an extended Yankee family of such events as the Dred Scott decision, John Brown's execution, Walt Whitman's poetry, Horace Greeley's editorials, Lincoln's inaugural speech, and much more. The Bingham-Johnson family contains at least a dozen memorable characters who love and hate, travel and write, marry and die. The dialogue is captivating and precisely formal, exactly as mid-nineteenth-century Americans talked and wrote. Long and lively hand-written letters (that moribund genre!) are exchanged between Paris and Poughkeepsie that show the singularly restless nature of Americans on both sides of the Atlantic. Erotic love is finely depicted, both in and out of marriage. This book seems immensely topical, with 1850s Washington portrayed as ‘a useless city, full of self-satisfied, corrupt men,’ and the United States as on the brink of an unspeakably tragic war. Given its brilliant interlace of American history and fiction, Yankee Doric would enliven many book club discussions.”
—Diana Wilson, author of Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World
Review of "Yankee Doric" by George Makana Clark
In Yankee Doric, Burton Raffel has created a sweeping, multigenerational saga of the Binghams, a prosperous New York family. The narrative unfolds amid the historical, economic, political, and social upheaval of a nation on the verge of tearing itself apart. Though the cast is large, the characters are well-drawn and distinct; their lives intersect with great historical figures, yet it’s through the Binghams’ romances, tragedies, successes and failures that this pivotal and vibrant period in American history comes alive for the reader.Though Yankee Doric is told through multiple perspectives, the story belongs to Jonathan Bingham; at heart, it is a Bildungsroman that follows his search for meaning and purpose in life. As a journalist, Jonathan witnesses key historical events, but it’s his role as a poet that allows him (and the reader) to make sense of these events and provide perspective.
A distinguished and widely respected translator and poet, Raffel has put his skills to good use as a novelist, interpreting a bygone era for a modern audience. The prose is utilitarian and devoid of frills, and yet it contains a simple elegance that reflects the novel’s setting and the aesthetics of these new Americans.
The novel’s panoramic settings are filled with rich images and vivid, evocative details. Especially memorable is Raffel’s portrait of New York City, the ever-changing, unsettled heart of the North, its docks crowded with ships, warehouses, cargo, and immigrants, a place of unbridled growth where buildings are slapped together, seemingly overnight, with many collapsing shortly thereafter.
Beneath the exuberance of Yankee Doric there is an undertone of inevitable catastrophe in the ever-present and growing threat of war. But if the novel closes with the devastating news of the first shots fired at Fort Sumter, it also hints at the nation that will emerge from the rubble, its people oriented westward, toward a new destiny.
In Yankee Doric, Burton has captured not only the historical detail of an era, but also its voice and spirit. Readers will be transported back to an America still struggling to forge its identity. It’s a continuing struggle, and many of the issues that dominate the antebellum world of Yankee Doric still resonate today.
[A recipient of an O. Henry Prize, George Makana Clark has published fiction in the Georgia Review, Glimmer Train, Transition, Tin House, Zoetrope, and elsewhere. He is the author of the novel, The Raw Man, and the short-story collection, The Small Bees’ Honey. He teaches fiction writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.]
Announcing Raffel's First Novel
FOR IMMEDIATE NEWS RELEASE
Contact person: James S. Baumlin, Senior Editor, Moon City Press
Department of English, Missouri State University, Springfield MO 65897
Phone 417.569.6034; email JBaumlin@MissouriState.edu
Yankee Doric: America Before the Civil War
A Novel by Burton Raffel
$29.95 cloth
ISBN 978-0-913785-22-5
Published 2010 by Moon City Press:
Published 2010 by Moon City Press:
Poet Burton Raffel’s First Published Novel an American Epic in Prose
Respected nationally as a poet, translator, and critic, Burton Raffel remains best known for his translation of Beowulf, which brought the world of Anglo-Saxon heroism to more than a million readers. With Yankee Doric: America Before the Civil War, Raffel looks closer to home, describing the United States—North and South together—in the years leading up to secession and battle. With the Civil War sesquicentennial approaching, Yankee Doric could not have arrived at a better time.
Though he has published more than one hundred books (of poetry translations, literary editions, and criticism), Yankee Doric is Raffel’s first published novel. “It is an ambitious work,” says its editor, Tita French Baumlin, “whose main characters embody a definitively American heroism, one embracing duty over love and self-sacrifice in the face of crisis. Chronicling the lives of the Bingham family and set in New York, Virginia, and Paris, the novel’s expansive world makes Yankee Doric an American epic in prose.” The novel’s “finely honed style,” Baumlin adds, “invokes the ‘plain style’ of the age’s Federalist aesthetic, as symbolized by the classical Doric order of architecture.”
Currently retired from teaching at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, Raffel has poured a lifetime of literary artistry and historical scholarship into its writing. Yankee Doric reminds readers what brought Americans to take up arms against each other. As Raffel describes it, “my aim was to characterize the actual run-up to a giant historic event, still perhaps the largest ever. I have tried to make my characters, North and South, both historically absolutely real and at the same time of fictive interest. I wanted the people of my time to understand not all the arguments, pro and con, about the Civil War, but how it felt to be feeling them in real time.”
On this latter point, Raffel explains: “Human time means feeling the pressures and also the vacancies of a particular era, in particular places, and in the particular human beings who, to my mind, best represent how it happened that a sprawling, modest, relatively honest young republic fought itself into the driving behemoth that the U.S. has become, in our post-Civil War existence. The U.S. after the Civil War was immediately, and well-recognized, to have experienced a drastic and unchangeable new existence. I take no stance in this novel. My purpose is to re-experience our at first slow, then faster and faster fall into Civil War.”
A Louisiana resident since 1989, Raffel was born and raised in New York City. He is in a unique position, thus, to depict both North and South. And readers are carried across the Atlantic, as well. As Raffel describes them, the many travel scenes “show not simply how Americans experienced foreign ways, but also how different the rest of the world then was (and still is) from our land and its social structures. I intended the death of Jonathan’s father, in horrible areas of the Middle East, to highlight the range of those differing social structures. Americans don't live only on our prosperous native lands, nor can we opt ourselves away from those other regions and their very, very different ways.”
Yankee Doric revolves around the lives, loves, and conflicts of the three Bingham children, Theodore, Jonathan, and Anne-Marie. Though a superbly talented pianist, Anne-Marie is fated to live and die as a housewife. Her daughter, passionately in love with her uncle Jonathan, moves into the international world of art (as a dancer) and—directly contrary to all expectations for women—decides not to marry, since the man she so loves will not marry her. Jonathan meets with a similar fortune, having fallen in love with the woman who, instead of him, chooses as a husband his dead sister’s widower.
Jonathan’s loss, Raffel notes, “ties him into the highly intense war against slavery, fought all over the land, in pen and ink and in physical actions. He who is not a politician becomes an activist, both as a believer, but even more as a man who wants at least to be near the woman he loves, even though he cannot have her.”
Though retired from teaching, Raffel continues to write at a furious pace from his Lafayette home, having recently completed the fifth of a series of deliberately short novels, full of plot movement. His poetic translation of Dante’s massive allegorical epic, The Divine Comedy, is forthcoming this year. “Lately, it seems that everything Raffel does is epic in scale,” says Baumlin, who adds that “Yankee Doric may be his first published novel, but it will not be his last.”
Yankee Doric can be ordered through local bookstores and via the internet. For catalog orders, contact the University of Arkansas Press, exclusive distributors of Moon City Press publications: http://www.uapress.com/titles/mcp/raffel.html
Q&A with Raffel
Author of the Novel, Yankee Doric: America Before the Civil War
Interview conducted with Tita F. Baumlin, Moon City Press contributing editor
TB: Throughout your career, you’ve been known as a poet, translator, and editor. Is the novel a new interest, or has fiction writing always been in your blood?
BR: In fact, I was first known as a writer of short fiction: I had the lead entry, and 100 pages of fiction, in Short Story 3 (Scribner’s, 1960). And perhaps because my agent, Candida Donadio (now deceased), was at that time one of the leading agents in New York, I was prominently featured in L. Rust Hills’ then infamously famous illustrated diagram on “The Structure of the American Literary Establishment” in Esquire’s 1963 issue. This “chart,” which was splashed on the page, started bright red in the center and paled out as it expanded (and lessened in importance). Hills organized these listings by the agents’ names, under which their chief clients were listed. Candida was then the agent for Phillip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, and five others, one of whom was “Burt Raffel.” Me. One early novel, unpublished as yet, but very much approved by my current agent, Donald Gastwirth, is entitled The Importance of Being Ernest, and I wrote most of it in 1949-1950.
TB: Besides writing, you have lived a professor’s nomadic life, teaching in universities in New York State, Colorado, Israel, Indonesia and, finally, Louisiana. And yet, having earned a J.D. from Yale, you had at first meant to follow in your lawyer-father’s footsteps. Did you come from a literate family?
BR: I decided to go to law school when my two-year post as a teacher in the Ford Foundation’s English Language Teacher Training Program, in Indonesia, was coming to an end. I had a wife, two very small children, and an M.A. in English. (I had abandoned the PhD program, on principle, about two-thirds of the way). That would not work. One day, as I was leafing through a copy of my father’s second law book, which I had edited and cleaned up for him (he punctuated, e.g., according to the Elizabethan translation of the Bible), I found myself reading with interest. So I applied to Yale, Harvard, and Columbia law schools, was accepted by all three, and chose Yale. Harvard wrote me a rather whiney letter, complaining that I had actually refused them.
Yes, my father read widely, but mostly in Biblical matters, and often in other languages, largely Hebrew, Russian, etc. My brother who attended Brooklyn College (at that time free for smart kids) read widely. But in literary matters, I had I think out-read them both by the time I entered high school.
TB: Yankee Doric is your first published novel, though you have other manuscripts in the works. Is historical fiction of special importance to you? Do you tend to weave history with fiction?
BR: I do what I always have urged upon my students: I follow my nose. Yankee Doric comes from a period, some thirty-odd years ago, when I was both teaching American literature and filling all the gaps of historical and cultural knowledge from which I suffered, having studied to be either a medievalist or a teacher of comparative literature. El Presidente, the first of my flood novels, is set in Liberia, where I have never been and about which, when I made the decision, I knew only a very little. I spent $200 on a batch of used books, and made myself a sort of expert.
TB: Your book’s complete title is Yankee Doric: America Before the Civil War. How familiar will the novel’s historic time frame be to general readers? What do they need to know, in order to read your novel well?
BR: A novel is not the place for historical scholarship. But every single fact in the book is grounded in well-established knowledge. I have tried to highlight this by setting a brief quotation from the letters of Daniel Webster at the head of each chapter. I have also made use of a good many actual persons: they did not actually say what I put in their mouths, of course, because the people to whom they say them, in my book, never existed. But I have tried very hard to catch their style, their sensibility, and their actual writing and speech.
TB: What research went into the writing?
BR: The research was, in a word, enormous—but, as I noted above, it was not mostly done because of the novel. Rather, it was because I wanted truly to know the period about which I was teaching. When, for example, I had the leading character come into contact with, and be employed by, maritime shipping, I based his work on what I had already learned from other volumes. When, however, I had to deal with highly specific matters—like what was in those ships, in what quantities, etc.—I went back to the books I had already read and scoured their pages for cargo lists. Everything that I mention as cargo was in fact cargo.
TB: Your novel is about two generations of the Bingham family: the elders, Doctor Bingham and his wife Marie, and their three children, Theodore, Anne-Marie, and Jonathan. From one angle, the novel follows the careers of Theodore and Jonathan, who both interact with many of the political luminaries of their time. From another angle, it is a deeply character-driven novel that explores the conflicts, both political and personal, between parents and children, between husbands and wives, between siblings, between friends. How would you describe this book to a reader deciding whether or not to open its pages?
BR: What I tried to do, in this longest of all my novels, was to characterize the actual run-up to a giant historic event, still perhaps the largest ever. I have tried to make my characters, North and South, both historically absolutely real and at the same time of fictive interest. I wanted the people of my time to understand not all the arguments, pro and con, about the Civil War, but how it felt to be feeling them in real time. Jonathan Bingham wanted to be a poet, and I have written him some historically accurate verse. But human beings don't live according to their own specifications. Human time means feeling the pressures and also the vacancies of a particular era, in particular places, and in the particular human beings who, to my mind, best represent how it happened that a sprawling, modest, relatively honest young republic fought itself into the driving behemoth that the U.S. has become, in our post-Civil War existence. The U.S. after the Civil War was immediately, and well-recognized, to have experienced a drastic and unchangeable new existence. I take no stance in this novel. My purpose is to re-experience our slow, then faster and faster fall into Civil War.
TB: I find this book especially appealing in the strong female characters that you’ve created. I don’t know if you’d call yourself a “feminist” author, but I think that I would. How do you respond to this proposition, in relation to this novel?
BR: I have always been a highly vocal feminist. It happened to me in the 1930s, when I was a small boy growing up, as slowly as we all do. Mine was an immigrant Russian Jewish family; we observed many of the most important Jewish holidays by convening, from time to time, at the home of one of our families. All the boys were set free to play, outside or in (the grownups preferred that we be outside), while festive preparations were being made. Girls, however, were all set to work, for hours and hours, on peeling potatoes, washing dishes, etc. We could see them through the windows; they could see, and they enviously watched, us. This seemed to me absolutely an unearned set of punishments on all my cousins who were female. I was really furious, and completely helpless. I can recall trying to sneak a girl or two out into the yard, and how I was calmly squelched—not punished. But the girls were scolded!
TB: This novel has a great geographical sweep. Can we say that “place” is a theme here?
BR: Oh yes! There is no accident to this geographical spread; indeed, I very deliberately constructed it, so as to indicate the actual spread both of our country and, in many cases, of our citizens working or traveling in foreign lands. These scenes, which occupy a good bit of the book, are designed to show not simply how Americans experienced foreign ways, but also how different the rest of the world then was (and still is) from our land and the social structures we live on it. I intended the death of Jonathan's father, in horrible areas of the Middle East, to sharply highlight the range of those differing social structures. Americans, I was trying to indicate, don't live only on our prosperous native lands, nor can we opt ourselves away from those other regions and their very, very different ways.
TB: Without giving away any plot “spoilers,” what would you say is the novel's great crisis?
BR: To me, anyway, the novel’s crisis has always been the death of Jonathan’s musician sister. Instead of making a musical existence, this superbly talented pianist has to become, and to die, a housewife. Her daughter, passionately in love with her uncle Jonathan, moves into the international world of art (as a dancer), and directly contrary to all expectations for women decides not to marry, since the man she so loves will not marry her. This ties directly into Jonathan's belated discovery of his love for the woman who, instead of him, chooses as a husband his dead sister’s widower. This, in its turn, ties him into the highly intense war against slavery, fought all over the land, in pen and ink and in physical actions. He who is not a politician becomes an activist, both as a believer, but even more as a man who wants at least to be near the woman he loves, even though he cannot have her.
TB: We’ve named some aspects of the novel here already. Are there other ways in which you feel the book might appeal to readers? Are there certain readers that you feel might find this book appealing?
BR: I will never forget the picture I had of the house in which I had the Bingham family live (and especially of the front entrance thereto). It was penned up over my writing table, and I squeezed every bit of meaningful detail I could out of it. I did the same thing with old pictures of interiors (which differed regionally), trying to get the feeling of being in those houses, and doing what the people who really did live there had done. This is not a casually historical novel, but a deeply researched and, in the end, loving portrayal of people, places, and events.
TB: Having published more than one hundred books with some of the nation’s most distinguished presses, you likely have some strong views on the current state of American letters. Do you have any observations, admonitions, or words of hope for contemporary readers and writers?
BR: Think: I was born in 1928. T. S. Eliot was still a suspicious “radical” poet. A scholarly book on literary activity in the Connecticut of the 1920s did not so much as mention Wallace Stevens. Ezra Pound was a traitor, a Fascist hireling, a crazy no-good-nik. That was ninety years ago; I am about to turn 82. I cannot help my age, or my dislike for what passes as good writing today, in poetry and in prose. I don't quite belong in the year 2010.
TB: What lies in the immediate future for you? What can readers expect to receive from your pen?
BR: I am whipping through the third of my flood novels, at the rate of about 2,000 words a day. I have a title and a plan for the fourth; I expect when I get into that book, I will start shaping up a fifth one, in my head only. It may be old, but my head still holds rather a lot of things—and there is always space when I need it.
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