A Hungarian voice in European modernism

Lőrinc Szabó
Miskolc, 31 March 1900 – Budapest, 3 October 1957

Lőrinc Szabó was one of the defining poets of twentieth-century Hungarian literature: an intensely modern writer whose poetry moves between intellect and sensual experience, self and world, desire and restraint, intimacy, nature, memory and loss.

He was also one of the great Hungarian literary translators of his century. Translation accompanied him from the very beginning of his career and remained inseparable from his development as a poet. Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Villon, Goethe, Pushkin and many other writers became, in his own phrase, his “eternal friends”.

Szabó’s mature poetry developed a voice very different from that of his teachers. His poems often unfold as arguments: the speaking self observes, questions, contradicts and interrogates itself. Philosophical thought, psychological precision and ordinary experience meet in language that can be strikingly direct while remaining formally exact.

His poetry changed repeatedly over more than three decades. The youthful intensity of his early work gave way to the sharper intellectual and dialogic poetry of the 1930s, and later to the great autobiographical and elegiac works of his final decade.

In Hungarian poetry, Szabó helped create a distinctly modern language for the divided self: analytical without becoming abstract, intimate without abandoning intellectual rigour. His poems can move from philosophical argument to the smallest details of ordinary life – a child, an animal, a landscape, a body, a moment of desire or fear – while keeping the pressure of thought constantly alive.

THE EDITOR AND JOURNALIST

Literature as a daily profession

Poetry and translation were only part of Szabó’s working life. For more than two decades he also worked as a journalist, first within the influential Az Est newspaper group and later for Pesti Napló and Magyarország, where he became an editor. In 1927 he founded and edited the short-lived literary journal Pandora.

The newspaper office was therefore another of Szabó’s working worlds: alongside poetry and translation, journalism formed part of his literary life.

Four landmarks

Beyond these major cycles and collections, Szabó wrote some of the most memorable shorter poems of modern Hungarian literature – poems of love and solitude, nature and mortality, childhood and family life. His poems about his son Lóci, in particular, became part of Hungary’s shared literary memory.

WAR AND AFTERMATH

A life interrupted

The Second World War and its aftermath marked a profound rupture in Szabó’s life. His political associations, journalism and travels to Germany during the preceding years came under scrutiny after 1945. He was detained and subjected to post-war investigations; although ultimately cleared with a formal reprimand, his opportunities to publish were severely restricted for a time.

This period of exclusion was also one of extraordinary poetic concentration. In these difficult post-war years Szabó turned increasingly towards memory, self-examination and translation. Tücsökzene (Cricket Music), first published in 1947, transformed the reconstruction of his life into one of the major autobiographical poetic works of twentieth-century Hungarian literature.

TRANSLATION AS POETRY

Making world literature speak Hungarian

For an international reader, the place of literary translation in Hungarian culture requires some explanation.

Hungarian belongs to the Uralic language family and is structurally very different from the Indo-European languages from which Szabó most often translated. Recreating an English, French, German or Russian poem in Hungarian therefore involves far more than replacing one set of words with another.

Hungarian literary culture also developed an unusually strong tradition of poet-translators. In the world of Nyugat, translation was not regarded as secondary literary labour. Major poets including Mihály Babits, Dezső Kosztolányi, Árpád Tóth and Lőrinc Szabó devoted substantial parts of their creative lives to bringing world literature into Hungarian. The Petőfi Literary Museum describes literary translation as deeply embedded in the history of Hungarian literature itself.

For Szabó, translating poetry meant recreating metre, rhythm, rhyme, imagery, tone and intellectual movement in a language governed by entirely different possibilities.

It was a form of extraordinarily close reading – but also of poetic creation.

TWENTY-ONE YEARS OLD

Shakespeare before his own first book

And Shakespeare was only the beginning

What makes this achievement even more remarkable is that the Sonnets were not an isolated youthful experiment. World literature came first.

From around 1920, Szabó supported himself largely through literary translation. Before and around the publication of his first collection of original poetry, he was already translating writers from several languages and literary traditions.

His early books included:

Omar Khayyám – Rubáiyát · 1920
Oscar Wilde – The Devoted Friend · 1920
Paul Verlaine – Femmes · 1920
William Shakespeare – Sonnets · 1921
Samuel Taylor Coleridge – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner · 1921

In 1923, the Hungarian Les Fleurs du mal appeared in the translations of Mihály Babits, Árpád Tóth and Lőrinc Szabó – three major poets of Hungarian modernism working together on Baudelaire.

Translation was therefore not a secondary activity that Szabó took up after establishing himself as a poet. It was there at the formation of his own poetic voice. He learned poetic languages partly by inhabiting, testing and remaking the work of other poets.

A LIFELONG ANTHOLOGY

Our Eternal Friends

Szabó’s lifelong engagement with world literature eventually took monumental form in Örök Barátaink (Our Eternal Friends), his great collection of literary translations.

EXPLORE SZABÓ’S INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY

Szabó’s translations ranged across centuries and literary traditions, from Shakespeare and Goethe to Baudelaire, Pushkin and beyond.

Open each section below to explore a selection of the writers and works he translated.

Literature in English

Szabó’s engagement with English-language literature was exceptionally rich.

Shakespeare · Blake · Wordsworth · Coleridge · Keats · Hardy · Yeats · Eliot
Click to explore writers & works ↓

16TH CENTURY
Sir Philip Sidney
one of the major poets of the English Renaissance.
William Shakespeare
the complete Sonnets; As You Like It, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, Troilus and Cressida, and other works by Shakespeare.
Francis Bacon
whose essays also formed part of Szabó’s engagement with English literature.
Ben Jonson
poet and dramatist of the English Renaissance.

17TH CENTURY
John Donne
including The Flea, among his celebrated metaphysical poems.

18TH CENTURY
Robert Burns
whose poetry brought the Scottish tradition into Szabó’s extraordinarily wide field of translation.
William Blake
including the famous Hungarian version of The Tyger.

19TH CENTURY
William Wordsworth
including Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, Composed upon Westminster Bridge, To the Cuckoo and I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
most notably The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a work Szabó returned to and revised.
Thomas Moore
the Irish poet whose lyrics were among Szabó’s translations.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
including Love’s Philosophy and other lyrics.
John Keats
whose poetry appears repeatedly among Szabó’s translations, including major sonnets.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
including How Do I Love Thee?
Edgar Allan Poe
including To Helen, The Conqueror Worm and The City in the Sea.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
including Ulysses, Tithonus and Break, Break, Break.
Robert Browning
including My Last Duchess, Meeting at Night and Parting at Morning.
Walt Whitman
one of the defining voices of nineteenth-century American poetry, also represented among Szabó’s translations.
Thomas Hardy
Szabó translated Hardy’s poetry as well as his novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Published in Hungarian as Egy tiszta nő, his translation of the novel has remained in circulation for generations and continues to be republished.
Robert Louis Stevenson
represented among Szabó’s wide-ranging translations from nineteenth-century literature.
Oscar Wilde
whose The Devoted Friend was already published in Szabó’s Hungarian translation in 1920.
Rudyard Kipling
including Cities and Thrones and Powers.

20TH CENTURY
W. B. Yeats
including Down by the Salley Gardens and When You Are Old.
T. S. Eliot
including The Hollow Men.

His translations from literature in English extended still further, ranging across several centuries of British, Irish and American writing. Taken together, they reveal not simply the breadth of Szabó’s reading, but a sustained engagement with some of the central traditions of poetry in the English language.

French literature

French poetry and drama formed another major part of Szabó’s literary world.

Villon · Molière · Baudelaire · Verlaine · Rimbaud · Valéry
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François Villon
whose ballads and Grand Testament became a substantial, repeatedly revised part of Szabó’s translation oeuvre.

Molière
including The Misanthrope, The School for Wives and Psyché.

Jean Racine
including Andromaque.

Victor Hugo
one of the great figures of French Romanticism, whose poetry was also represented among Szabó’s translations.

Charles Baudelaire
present from the very beginning of Szabó’s career. He translated Baudelaire’s prose poems as a young man and, together with Mihály Babits and Árpád Tóth, contributed to the landmark Hungarian edition of Les Fleurs du mal. Baudelaire remained a lifelong translation project for Szabó, who repeatedly revised his versions.

Paul Verlaine
whom Szabó was already translating in 1920 and to whom he later devoted a volume of selected poems.

Arthur Rimbaud
whose poetry Szabó translated and whose work also left a trace on his own poetic development.

Guy de Maupassant
showing the breadth of Szabó’s work beyond poetry and drama: he also translated a volume of Maupassant’s stories.

Paul Valéry
extending Szabó’s engagement with French poetry into twentieth-century modernism.

This is not an exhaustive list. His translations from French ranged across centuries and genres, from Renaissance poetry and classical drama to Romanticism, Symbolism and twentieth-century modernism.

German literature

German literature occupied a particularly important place in Szabó’s intellectual and translation work. German was also one of the principal languages through which he encountered European and world literature.

Goethe · Heine · Kleist · Storm · Stefan George
Click to explore writers & works ↓

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
was one of the central figures of Szabó’s lifelong engagement with German literature. In 1932 he contributed to three substantial Hungarian anthologies devoted to Goethe’s youth, maturity and later years, and he later translated The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Heinrich Heine
whose poetry Szabó translated repeatedly; his versions also appeared in later Hungarian Heine collections.

Heinrich von Kleist
including Amphitryon, published in Szabó’s Hungarian translation in 1938.

Theodor Storm
whose lyrical poetry was also part of Szabó’s sustained engagement with nineteenth-century German literature.

Stefan George
whose poetry had a more personal significance for Szabó: he translated several of George’s poems and regarded him as an important intellectual and poetic influence.

Eduard Mörike
represented among the German poets Szabó translated in his extensive lyrical translation work.

Nikolaus Lenau
another significant nineteenth-century German-language poet repeatedly represented among Szabó’s translations.

This is not an exhaustive list. Szabó’s translations from German extended across several centuries and literary movements, from Goethe and Romanticism to nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry.

Russian poetry

Later in his career, Szabó undertook several substantial translations from Russian literature.

Pushkin · Tyutchev · Mayakovsky
Click to explore writers & works ↓

Alexander Pushkin
including the narrative poem The Fountain of Bakhchisaray, alongside a number of shorter poems.

Ivan Krylov
whose fables Szabó translated in substantial number; a Hungarian volume of his Selected Fables appeared in 1952.

Fyodor Tyutchev
to whom Szabó devoted an entire volume of translations in 1953. He became deeply engaged with Tyutchev’s subtle, philosophical lyric poetry and saw him as a poet who deserved to be newly discovered by Hungarian readers.

Vladimir Mayakovsky
including the long poem 150,000,000. Szabó received the József Attila Prize in 1954 for his literary translations, with particular recognition given to his work on Mayakovsky.

Beyond Europe

Szabó’s literary horizon extended still further, reaching Persian, Chinese and other literary traditions, sometimes through intermediary languages.

Omar Khayyám • Du Fu (Tu Fu) • Li Bai (Li Tai-po)
Click to explore writers & works ↓

Omar Khayyám
Szabó returned repeatedly to the Rubáiyát. His later version was based on Edward FitzGerald’s celebrated English adaptation, illustrating the complex role intermediary languages could play in twentieth-century literary translation.

Du Fu (Tu Fu)
Szabó translated poems by the great Tang-dynasty Chinese poet and devoted a radio programme to him in 1953, in which his own translations were performed.

Li Bai (Li Tai-po)
another central figure of classical Chinese poetry represented among Szabó’s translations in Our Eternal Friends

His engagement with the East went beyond translation. Lao Tzu, Zhuangzi and Indian religious and philosophical traditions became important points of reference in his own thinking and poetry. His surviving library itself contained a substantial collection of Chinese and Indian literature.

This is an important reminder that Szabó’s interaction with world literature was not limited to Europe – nor was it always a matter of direct translation from the original language. Editions, intermediary languages, philosophical texts and earlier translations could all become part of his creative process.

Eastern thought was not merely part of Szabó’s reading and translation practice; it also became one of the formative influences on his own poetry, especially in You and the World and Private Truce.

RE-CREATION, NOT REPLACEMENT

A poem has to become a poem again

Szabó’s own writings on translation make clear that he did not see the translator’s task as a mechanical transfer of meaning.

His mature practice involved constant revision. Shakespeare’s Sonnets are the clearest example: the twenty-one-year-old translator returned to them across nearly a quarter of a century because his own understanding of poetry, language and Shakespeare had changed.

The same impulse can be seen throughout his translation career. Versions were reconsidered, altered and refined.

The aim was fidelity – but fidelity understood poetically: not merely to dictionary meaning, but to the life of the poem as form, voice, rhythm and thought.

This is one reason why so many of Szabó’s translations entered Hungarian literature not as temporary aids to reading foreign writers, but as literary texts with histories of their own.

LŐRINC SZABÓ IN OTHER LANGUAGES

The journey in the other direction

Although Szabó spent much of his life bringing foreign poetry into Hungarian, his own work has travelled outward more unevenly.

His poetry has appeared in foreign-language anthologies and selections, and individual works have been translated into a number of languages. Yet his international readership remains much smaller than his position within Hungarian literature would suggest.

That imbalance is important. Hungarian poetry has always faced the difficulty of crossing a linguistic boundary that relatively few readers outside Hungary can approach in the original.

The result is that one of the major Hungarian poetic voices of the twentieth century can still be a discovery for readers elsewhere.

SZABÓ IN ENGLISH

A voice repeatedly rediscovered

More recently, Joe Váradi has been building a substantial new body of English translations, including poems connected with Szabó’s children, love poetry and later work. Several have already appeared in English-language literary publications, while further translations continue to be prepared.

Yet there is still no definitive English edition of Szabó’s poetry

Despite these important efforts, Szabó’s presence in English remains fragmentary. There is no single widely available English edition that represents the full range of his poetry – the intellectual poems of the 1930s, the autobiographical Cricket Music, the Lóci poems, the love poetry and The Twenty-Sixth Year – with anything like the breadth of his standing in Hungarian literature.

For English-language readers, therefore, Lőrinc Szabó remains a major European poet still waiting to be fully discovered.

HIS LIFE

The life behind the work

Lőrinc Szabó’s life spanned two world wars, the collapse and remaking of Hungary, intense literary friendships and conflicts, family life, travel, political upheaval and periods of enforced isolation. His home life and personal relationships were inseparable from his poetry.

Click here to read the biography

From Miskolc to Budapest

Lőrinc Szabó was born in Miskolc on 31 March 1900, the son of a railway engine driver. His childhood took him from Miskolc to Balassagyarmat and, from 1909, to Debrecen, where he attended the Debrecen Reformed College. He began reading and copying the poetry of Ady, Babits, Baudelaire and Verlaine while still at school, and made his first attempts at translation there.

After moving to Budapest at the end of the First World War, he entered the literary world surrounding Mihály Babits and the journal Nyugat. Babits recognised the young poet’s remarkable talent, briefly took him into his own home, and became an important early mentor. By his early twenties Szabó was already translating major works of European literature while beginning to establish his own poetic voice.

Marriage, children and literary life

In 1921 Szabó met Klára Mikes, daughter of the influential editor and translator Lajos Mikes; they married at the end of that year. Their daughter Klára, known within the family and in poems as Kisklára, was born in 1923 and later became the actress Gáborjáni Klára. Their son Lőrinc, born in 1929 and universally known as Lóci, became the child at the centre of some of his father’s best-loved poems and later worked as a film director.

Literature was also Szabó’s daily profession. He worked for the influential Az Est newspaper group, later for Pesti Napló and, from 1928 until 1945, for Magyarország, where he eventually became one of the paper’s editors. In 1927 he founded and edited the short-lived but ambitious literary journal Pandora. Journalism, editing, poetry and translation ran alongside one another for much of his adult life.

A complicated private life

Szabó’s marriage to Klára endured throughout his life, but from the mid-1920s he also had a long relationship with Erzsébet Korzáti, a close family acquaintance. The relationship lasted for approximately twenty-five years and became one of the defining emotional experiences of his life. Its existence placed enormous strain on all three people involved and cannot be separated from a significant part of Szabó’s love poetry.

Korzáti’s death by suicide in February 1950 devastated him. In the following year he wrote the core of A huszonhatodik év (The Twenty-Sixth Year), the extraordinary sonnet sequence through which private grief became one of the major works of his late poetry.

The Volkmann Street years

By the early 1930s Szabó had become an established figure in Hungarian literary life. Te meg a világ (You and the World, 1932) marked a decisive stage in his mature poetry, and he received the Baumgarten Prize that same year.

In May 1935, Szabó, Klára and their children moved to the first-floor apartment at 8 Volkmann Street in Buda. It remained his home for the rest of his life. From this apartment he went to the newspaper office, travelled widely, returned from periods of illness and holidays at Lake Balaton, received friends and fellow writers, and worked among the thousands of books that gradually filled his study. It is this room that survives today as the Lőrinc Szabó Memorial Room.

His life during these decades extended well beyond the study. He travelled throughout Central and Western Europe and, as a journalist, as far as Egypt; he spent important periods working at Lake Balaton and elsewhere in Hungary. These journeys, landscapes and encounters repeatedly entered his poems.

War and its aftermath

Szabó’s public position during the 1930s and the Second World War is one of the more complex aspects of his biography. Some of his journalism, public statements and associations later became the subject of political criticism, and not without reason. At the same time, they do not add up to a simple or consistent political identity: his views and choices were often contradictory, and his literary work cannot be reduced to an ideological position. Significantly, post-war investigations did not regard his poetry itself as having served a political movement or ideology.

After 1945 Szabó’s conduct before and during the war was examined in two professional and political screening procedures. Like many others, he was detained for questioning, while writers and others who knew his wartime conduct also testified on his behalf. The proceedings ultimately cleared him of the more serious accusations, while issuing a formal reprimand. Under the emerging Communist cultural system, his position in Hungarian literary life nevertheless became increasingly precarious, and his opportunities to publish original work were severely restricted. Translation consequently became both a central part of his literary work and an important means of earning a living.

It was during this unsettled period that he began Tücsökzene (Cricket Music). Starting in August 1945, he turned towards memory, childhood and self-examination, reconstructing a life in a vast autobiographical sequence first published in 1947. The coincidence is striking: at a moment when his public past was being judged by others, Szabó began one of the great acts of poetic self-recollection in Hungarian literature.

The final years

The early 1950s combined extraordinary productivity with increasingly serious illness. Translation became a major part of his work: these years included Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, a volume of Tyutchev, Shakespeare and Molière, among many others. In 1954 he received the József Attila Prize, principally in recognition of his literary translations.

His health, however, deteriorated. He suffered his first coronary thrombosis in 1951 and a second in 1954, followed by long periods of hospital treatment and severe arthritis. At the same time his position in Hungarian literary life began to recover. A new selection of his poetry appeared in 1956, edited and introduced by his close friend Gyula Illyés, and Szabó was elected to the leadership of the Hungarian Writers’ Association.

In March 1957 he received Hungary’s highest cultural honour, the Kossuth Prize. A huszonhatodik év appeared that spring, and an expanded edition of Tücsökzene followed in September. On 3 October 1957, after another period of illness, Szabó died in Budapest at the age of fifty-seven. He was buried five days later with major public honours.

A life that remained in the room

After his death, his family preserved the Volkmann Street study, its library and the objects of his everyday working life. What survives there connects the different strands of Szabó’s biography unusually closely: husband and father, journalist and editor, traveller, reader, translator and, above all, poet.

The room makes visible something his writing continually explored: a life lived in constant conversation with memory, experience, language and the wider world.

LEGACY

The poet, the reader, the translator

Szabó’s importance in Hungarian literature rests not on a single aspect of his work.

Above all, Szabó was a poet of unusual psychological and intellectual force – one of the central voices of twentieth-century Hungarian literature. He was also a relentless reader and a translator whose relationship with world literature helped reshape the possibilities of Hungarian poetic language.