The Death of King Arthur

Award-winning British poet Armitage follows his celebrated 2007 translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with this muscular, clanging rendering of the Middle English Alliterative Morte Arthure. The original poem appears on facing pages and presents readers with a miscellany of linguistic loose ends, some lines requiring very little translation and others remaining lost in the Middle English word horde. Armitage's translation preserves the robust alliteration of the original and utilizes the repeated blows of letter sounds to evoke the din of battle as well as to propel the poem to its ferocious and tragic end. Here, Arthur is an ambivalent figure, sure of God's grace yet troubled by dreams that bind the fate of all Britons to his conflict with Sir Lucius, the Roman emperor whose ambition and arrogance mirror Arthur's.