A translation of the young adult novel Abigél into English was long overdue.
With well over a dozen novels to her name, only seven have been translated into English, four of them since 2000, which means that she is little known to English audiences despite her enthusiastic reception across Europe and throughout the world. While acknowledging that “longing, suffering, anger and passion” are universal, she insisted that she only ever wrote about Hungarian problems, and about her native city of Debrecen. Likewise, when the French translation of her 1987 novel Az Ajtó ( The Door) was published, the critic for Le Figaro described her as a “precious gem”, comparable in merit to Flaubert and Proust.Īlthough translated into 33 languages already during her lifetime (the figure now stands at 40), Magda Szabó herself seemed baffled by her international success.
The German translation came out in 1960, marking Magda Szabó’s first steps towards international fame. Soon after Szabó’s first novel, Freskó, was published in 1958, it was brought to the attention of the German publishing house Insel by Hermann Hesse, who referred to Szabó as a “brilliant catch” for the publisher. In 2018, a documentary film was made about the life of Magda Szabó, in which director Gábor Zsigmond Papp explores what he refers to as the “bizarre question” of why an author who is regarded as among the best in the world outside Hungary is so little esteemed in her own country.
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