In the 1950s he worked as a horticulturist, writing a book "The Tall Bearded Iris" (1956). In 1968 he entered 31 separate pseudonymous translations of a single Baudelaire poem, in a competition for the "Sunday Times", run by George Steiner. Each translation focused on a different element of the poem: rhyme, pattern, tropes, symbolism, etc. producing vastly different results, to illustrate the inadequacies and lacunae produced in translation. This work was published in 1973 as "Spleen"; it is also available online.