Magda Szabó began her career as a poet but is also acknowledged as a successful playwright, essayist, and travel writer. She is, moreover, an astute and elegant translator, notably of William Shakespeare and John Galsworthy, but she has established her reputation primarily as a writer of fiction. Her novels have been translated into thirty-three languages, including Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and English. Several of her novels have been translated in more than one version--Az ajtó (The Door), for example, was published in 1987, translated into German in 1990 as Die tür , and then translated into English as The Door in 1994; the French translation of Mózes egy, huszonketto (Moses One Twenty-Two, 1967), titled 1 Moses 22 (1968), was published nine times. Szabó is now recognized as one of the most popular writers in contemporary Hungarian literature.

Szabó has continued a...