Muriel Spark, in a series of tightly organized, sharply pointed novels, has achieved, with an amazing degree of illumination, translations of vast abstractions into crisp, containing modern terms, never losing the necessary qualities of suggestiveness and humility.

For she has tackled the most difficult translation of all…. She has obviously set herself the task of bringing good and evil over into concrete objects of consideration and into explicit situations. It is a temptation to say that she is never didactic, but simply investigative, a sentiment of this sort usually being considered loftily complimentary. But actually she maintains firm stands: she is a translator of something objective (and in that sense foreign); she has the born translator's compulsion to make it accessible, and for the work which she loves, she entertains an undeviating conviction of the rightness of its terms.

Her frame of reference is the Catholic moral universe...