Szabó, Lõrinc

Born Mar. 31, 1900, in Miskolc; died Oct. 3, 1957, in Budapest. Hungarian poet and translator.

Szabó’s poetry collections Earth, Forest, God (1922), Caliban (1923), and Satan’s Masterpieces (1926) voice an enraged, anarchistic, often expressionistic, protest against the bourgeois order. Such collections as You and the World (1932), A Separate Peace (1936), and Battle for a Holiday (1938) are imbued with individualism and a sense of disillusionment with culture and democracy. Wartime impressions and a reappraisal of the past in the light of life’s experience brought Szabó to the more harmonious world view of the autobiographical lyric cycle The Chirring of Grasshoppers (1947–57). Szabó translated into Hungarian many works by Shakespeare, F. Villon, Molière, Omar Khayyam, A. S. Pushkin, V. V. Mayakovsky and other writers. He was awarded the A. József Prize in 1954 and the L. Kossuth Prize in 1957.