King Arthur's Delirium of Disembowelment

Simon Armitage has already translated one of the great pre-Renaissance English poems, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2007). Lines from Gawain – "Sumwhyle with wodwos he werrez, and with wolves als" and so on – formed the epigraph to Ted Hughes's 1967 collection Wodwo, a book that showed the then future poet laureate in training for his bloodstained epic Crow ( 1970). Crow is a sort of nightmare beast fable taking place as much in the back of the mind as in the outer world, with the supernatural gradually giving way to Freud. To some degree Armitage's latest work, a translation of the anonymous early 15th-century epic Alliterative Morte Arthure (not to be confused with Malory's prose Le Morte d'Arthur), works in parallel to Crow, though its concern, as befits a more secular poet such as Armitage, is with realpolitik rather than psychology. Not for the first time, Armitage seems to be fruitfully shadowing the predecessor whose work first inspired him.