Lőrinc Szabó

He was born in Miskolc as the son of an engine driver, Lőrinc Szabó sr., and Ilona Panyiczky.

His first book of poetry was published in 1922 under the title Föld, erdő, Isten ("Earth, Forest, God") and received considerable success.

As a translator, he translated several works of Shakespeare (Timon of Athens in 1935, As You Like It in 1938, Macbeth in 1939, Troilus and Cressida in 1948); Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal (together with Babits and Árpád Tóth); François Villon's Grand Testament, Molière's L'École des femmes, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and works of Verlaine, Tyutchev, Pushkin, Krylov, Kleist, Mörike, Nietzsche, George, Rilke, Benn and Weinheber.

In 1942 Lőrinc Szabó joined the "Europäische Schriftstellervereinigung" (i.e. European Writers' League) which had been founded by Joseph Goebbels.

This led to him being considered right-wing, and because of this, after the war he was left out of cultural life and could publish only translations, not his own works.