Plath and Hughes (cont.)

.... Suzette Macedo became friends with Plath and Hughes when she and her husband, Portuguese Writer-in-Residence Helder Macedo, lived in London where the couples belonged to a literary circle of writers and poets. Macedo spoke about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes’ poetry and their lives together in a talk for the Center for British Studies.

Some can speak from only an academic perspective when discussing poetry, but Macedo, a well-known literary translator of Portuguese/English works, spoke not only about Hughes' and Plath’s poetry but about how specific poems related directly to their environment and events in their personal lives. She delved into Ted Hughes’ The Birthday Letters and showed how the poems were related and intertwined with Sylvia Plath’s poetry and the couple’s life together.

She described movingly her dismay as she realized a mutual friend, Assia Wevill, was starting an affair with Hughes which would eventually traumatize Plath when she learned of it. Macedo also described being at the Hughes/Plath home the day that Plath committed suicide and she vividly recalled comforting Plath’s children. After that day, she said she saw little of the children because Hughes felt she was a reminder of that terrible time.

Macedo was a Graduate Tutor in English Literature, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and a Lecturer in English Literature, Hillbrow University, Johannesburg. She has contributed interviews to the following books: Bitter Fame: a Life of Sylvia Plath, The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath, and Her Husband: Hughes and Plath: a Marriage.

At her talk for the Center for British Studies, Suzette Macedo shared her personal history and her experience of their poetry to give her listeners a rare first-hand glimpse into the intimate life of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.

— Candace Groskreutz