Ali,

Your question is interesting: how did I get on with literature - with my love of literature, and how did this happen as early as it seems to have happened. Actually, it did happen very early, but I can't pinpoint a single magical moment that started it all. There have been a few such "moments" in my early life. In fact, quite a few. I remember an aunt telling me good-night stories that I listened to with rapture, but that happened before I knew how to read. I think I had mentioned to you before - in an e-mail - that the first book I may have read from cover to cover (when I was still in first-grade) was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. As a matter of fact, I am not really sure of that either (though, of course, if it's true, what I read was a Hungarian translation of that great American fairy tale). There was another novel-length fairy tale that I remember reading around that same time. It was a book by the Hungarian Elek Benedek. And I remembered the title (in English) as The Enchanter. This turns out not to have been the actual title. It wasn't until I was 43 and visited my father in Hungary that I told him how I could never find that book again. Well, the book has a longer title, and now I have the copy that my father gave me at the time I am talking about now. In fact, just recently I have started to translate the whole book into English. These episodes are examples of my early love of reading. But perhaps the most interesting story is as follows:

When I was still in first grade, I happen to have misread the title of a book lying on a bench in the hallway of our apartment in Budapest. My favorite uncle - my mother's younger brother - witnessed this and assumed that I had some kind of problem with reading. So he made me read five pages of Don Quixote every day thereafter, and when he came back from work, he would have me recite the events covered in those five pages on a daily basis. I must have done this all right, because my uncle soon gave up on testing me any further. And after that I was on my own. I guess that having to recite the parts of the plot of Cervantes's great novel (perhaps still the greatest novel in the West) every afternoon for a time was my entry into the world of literature.

But perhaps the most important part of this whole story is that thus, early in life, I absolutely fell in love with the magic of words. They can say so much about the human heart (and mind and soul). To this day I am an avid reader - a lover of poems and plays and stories and novels and even of movies. When the mind and the heart work together to respond to the best that people are capable of saying with words, there is suddenly always magic in the world greater than which there is none.