Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort, as co-founders of the quarterly magazine Modern Poetry in Translation, had a working relationship over many years. Weissbort provides a unique insight into Hughes’s views on translation and on his interest in making accessible the work of foreign-language poets and classical drama.

"Poetry is less and less a prisoner of its own language", Hughes wrote, inaugurating the first Poetry International. With many examples, Weissbort examines the ways in which Hughes worked with texts, often in collaboration with the original writers, from modern European poets, especially those of or associated with Eastern Europe, to Pushkin, Racine, Ovid and including Hughes’s invented language forOrghast.

Daniel Weissbort, along with Ted Hughes, founded the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation in 1965. Weissbort remained editor until 2003. He directed the Translation Program at the University of Iowa, where he is an Emeritus Professor. He is Honorary Professor in the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick. Weissbort has published numerous collections of translations and anthologies, and he edited Ted Hughes: Selected Translations for Faber, as well as collections of his own poetry, most recently, Letters to Ted (2003). Ted Hughes and Weissbort co-edited Selected Poems of Yehuda Amichai, published in 2000.

A unique record and assessment of the life and work of the two poets by one of Ted Hughes’s closest friends.

The author, an American, met Ted Hughes in Cambridge in 1955. They became friends and met Sylvia Plath at the party which was the scene of Hughes and Plath’s first encounter. Ted stayed with Myers during his courtship of Sylvia in the spring of 1956, before their marriage in the summer. Myers also discusses the role of Assia Wevill, whom he met in 1964, staying for a time in the flat she shared with her husband. 

The intertwined relationships of the poets and their families are unravelled, previously published accounts and interpretations of events are scrupulously put right, and the routes to Hughes’s Birthday Letters and Plath’s ‘Ariel voice’ carefully followed.

Lucas Myers was born in Tennessee, in 1930. After Groton School and the University of the South, he was a student at Cambridge, graduating in 1956. He taught in Rome and Paris, and in 1960, returned to the USA, where he was employed by the United Nations and the United States Government. After a return to Europe, he lived in New York, San Francisco and India. In 1997, he retired and returned with his wife to Tennessee. Lucas Myers is the author of Crow Steered Bergs Appeared, published in 2001

Susan Alliston was born and educated in England. In 1960 she moved with her husband to Tunisia, returning to London in 1962. At first a secretary and later a reader for Faber & Faber and Penguin Books, she was friendly with a number of writers who met at the Lamb pub in Holborn. Among them was Ted Hughes. He encouraged her writing, and the journals cast light on aspects of his life and work. Susan Alliston died in 1969.

"...a weird blend of something savage and a bit surreal with a hard, fine conscientious realism." - Ted Hughes, 1970

Daniel Huws became a close friend of Ted Hughes at Cambridge. In this memoir he describes the young and still carefree Ted Hughes, his Cambridge friends, his enthusiasms, his coming out as a poet, the arrival on the scene of Sylvia Plath and of their years in London.

Daniel Huws was a contemporary of Ted Hughes at Cambridge. He was Keeper of Manuscripts at the National Library of Wales until 1992. Two collections of his poetry have been published, Noth (London: Secker & Warburg, 1972) and The Quarry (London: Faber & Faber, 1999). He has written extensively, in English and Welsh, on Welsh manuscripts and on Welsh traditional music. He was awarded the Derek Allen Prize for Celtic Studies by the British Academy in 2006.