Borbás Andrea: Tükör és kancsó. Képeskönyv Szabó Magda születésének századik évfordulójára, a Petőfi Irodalmi Múzeum Annyi titkom maradt… című kiállítása alapján (Budapest, 2017)
Andrea Borbás: English Summary
English Nummary ANDREA BORBÁS Magda Szabó (1917-2007), poet, dramatist, essayist and novelist, best known to readers as author of Az Ajtó (1987), translated into English in 2005 as The Door. Throughout the novel, Szabó sows plentiful allusions—to Book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid, to Shaw and E. T. A. Hoffmann, to the Fates of Greek myth and the Bible, even to Gone With the Wind—that lend Emerence a superhuman significance. She maybe a mere housekeeper, but she is also an indomitable icon. It is a stature, Szabó implies, of which Emerence is not unaware, which makes the onset of her human frailty, the advent of true old age, perilous and tragic. When that time comes, Magda and Emerence have a different understanding of what it means to care lovingly for an ailing friend. Magda Szabó was born into an old Protestant family in Debrecen, the ‘Calvinist Rome’ of Eastern Hungary, whose distinctive intellectual and moral traditions shaped her mind and underpinned her art. She began her literary career not as a novelist but as a poet. Having read Latin and Hungarian at the University of Debrecen, she spent the years of the Second World War as a teacher. By 1945 she was a civil servant in the Ministry of Religion and Public Education. Besides poems and novels Magda Szabó wrote short stories, children's and juvenile literature, plays, film scripts and essays; translated from English and Spanish. She wrote more than forty works and was translated into thirty languages. Her works have scarcely been published in English but a large number of them were translated to French and German. Her style is analytical yet passionate; she describes the powers that formed the fate of her characters with great psychological insight, often centering on women trying to keep their independence and dignity through historical and domestic turmoils. The exhibition of the Petőfi Literary Museum in 2017 was organized to mark the 100th birthday of Magda Szabó. Our booklet is made to commemorate this exhibition, to preserve its photographs, objects and interiors. 103
