Season in Hell

Norman Cameron (1905-53) was born in India and educated at Fettes College and Oriel College, Cambridge. He worked as a superintendent of Education in Nigeria, before becoming an advertising copywriter in London. During the 1930s he was a frequent contributor to Geoffrey Grigson's 'New Verse'. He was awarded an MBE for his propaganda work during the war, and served with British forces in Austria until 1947, when he returned to London and advertising. In addition to his translations of Rimbaud, he published several collections of poetry including 'The Winter House' (1935) and 'Work in Hand' (1942). His 'Collected Poems' (edited by Warren Hope and Jonathan Barker) was published by Anvil in 1990.

'Norman Cameron published two collections of translations from the work of the French poet Rimbaud during his lifetime. These have been brought together and they seem to me to provide a touchstone of what poetic translation is all about. Cameron never inserts his own personality between the reader and the text. Instead he puts all his skill as a poet at Rimbaud's service, with astonishing results. This is a bilingual edition so that on page after page one can see the alchemy of Rimbaud's words mirrored in English gold. If there has been a finer translation of any poet this century then I do not know it. Perhaps the secret lies in Cameron's own poetic practice: he wrote poems only when he felt compelled to do so by having that to say which could be said in no other way, and he seems to have recognised and captured a similar impress of necessity in Rimbaud. These versions were made for love and it shows' - Robert Nye, The Times