Douglas Parmée (1914–2008)

He was born in West Dean in Sussex in 1914 — despite the name, there was no French blood in the family for at least 300 years. He attended Simon Langton Boys’ School in Canterbury and then the Perse School in Cambridge. In 1933 he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, as a teacher training college student. He left in 1936 to do post-graduate work at the University of Bonn and a doctorate at the Sorbonne. Back in England he became secretary of the students’ department in the London office of the British Council from 1939 to 1941, when he was claimed by RAF Intelligence and then the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. In 1944 he married Gwen Hepworth. In 1946, after a postwar stint in Berlin, he joined the French department at Cambridge, and soon became a Fellow of Queens’ College, where he remained until he retired.

It was after the success of his Twelve French Poets that he turned to translation, and his output ranged widely. He was divorced from his first wife in the early 1970s, and soon married Margaret (Meg) Clarke. After his retirement in 1981 they went to live in Adelaide, South Australia.