When I came home—without a key—to find the apartment locked, I asked the super to open it. He refused since the apartment had been rented in her name. While I sat in a patrol car being gently questioned by the police, a hearse arrived, and I watched from the front of that squad car as she was carried out on a stretcher and driven away. During the darkest days of that experience, Burton supported me with great love and insight. He helped me see my way through confusion, into grief, and through my grief into whatever clarity of mind and heart lay beyond.
I had many good friends who shared my grief and helped a great deal, but it was Burton who provided the loving counsel I needed then. Six months later, when I met my future wife Colleen, Burton let me know he was overjoyed, but also warned that things might be difficult at first, precisely because I felt so deeply toward her. When I showed him the inevitable sentimental love poems, he told me to grapple with what I was really feeling, which was a complicated and painful mix of emotions: my love for Colleen brought forth a resurgence of the grief I had buried, which caused me at first to be destructive to this precious new relationship.
Burton prodded me to write from that place, and was unmerciful when I indulged in padded romantic tripe. Luckily for me, Colleen stayed with me during our difficult early months. A year or so later, we were married in a beautiful outdoor wedding in the Colorado foothills, and—inexplicably to all our friends and family—moved to rural northern Florida. As soon as we moved, and without ever stopping to comprehend what I was asking of him, I would mail a handful of poems to Burton, who would then edit and comment—extensively—and send them back.
And as soon as I got a letter from him, I would put another batch of poems in the mail. He read the poems I wrote when, after a year in Florida, we moved to Vermont; and when Colleen and I decided to have our first baby at home, he wrote passionately against it—there was too great a chance, he said, that something might go wrong.
And when he edited a wonderful introduction to poetry, How to Read a Poem, he generously included—and wrote extensively about—my work. He praised my first few books in reviews for The Literary Review and other journals, and he blurbed other books of mine enthusiastically—in short he did everything in his power to support the worldly and artistic success of my writing.
By the time email came into general use, our weekly letters had ended. Thus twenty-five years of mentorship came to its natural end. When I think of the many gifts he gave me over many years and realize that these gifts have been central to my being as a poet and a person, I feel a gratitude that plumbs and disturbs the muck at the bottom of whoever I am, and wakes the strange, vivid creatures living there. My one regret now is that I never properly thanked him.
Michael Hettich has published a dozen books of poetry, most recently To Start an Orchard Press 53, A new book, The Mica Mine , is forthcoming. His work has appeared in many journals and in a number of anthologies as well. He lives in Black Mountain, NC.
His website is michaelhettich. More Posts 2. They pull us in and push at us Re-Hump [Video] Re-Hump , a demanding duet for two pregnant women, is Issue 64 September Stay Connected. Search the Archives. Raffel was also a poet in his own right; over the years he 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 s.
Raffel was born in New York City in Between and , he served as founding editor of Foundation News, a trade journal published by the Council on Foundations. From until his death, he served on the faculty of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, ultimately retiring from active service as distinguished professor emeritus of arts and humanities and professor emeritus of English in Previously, he taught at Brooklyn College lecturer in English, —51 , Stony Brook University instructor of English, —65; assistant professor of English, —66 , the University at Buffalo associate professor of English, —68 , the University of Haifa visiting professor of English, —69 , the University of Texas at Austin visiting professor of English, —70; professor of English and classics and chair of the graduate program in comparative literature, —71 , the Ontario College of Art senior tutor, —72 , York University visiting professor of humanities, —75 , Emory University visiting professor, spring and the University of Denver professor of English, — Raffel's main contribution to translation theory was the principle of "syntactic tracking", which he championed in a monograph published in The Art of Translating Poetry Burton Raffel 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.
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