I loved Szerb’s novels when I first discovered them, and read Journey by Moonlight in a single breathless day. Before long I had bought all of his books available in English (including one I had to order from a bookshop in Budapest), and had already begun to dread the day I would finish them all. I decided that I would expand my collection of Szerb in English, by any means necessary.

My aim with this site is to publish Szerb’s essays in new translations, one at a time, alongside the Hungarian original, with a view to eventually translating his entire body of work.

I cannot read or speak Hungarian at all, although certain words are beginning to look familiar to me. I’m using large language models (LLMs), and editing the translation: rewriting to improve the English, checking ambiguous phrasing, and adding explanatory footnotes where needed. I don’t think AI is (yet) competitive with the best human translators for literary translations, but the newest models seem to have a very good grasp of the language for most purposes.

The title of this site, ‘Half-Understood Things’, comes from a line in Books and Youth: An Elegy, in which Szerb laments that young people have no new literary movements, and he understands all the new books:

‘Dear friend, if you do not write to me soon about some magnificent avant-garde movement, some new unrest that is beginning to ferment out there, I shall — who knows? — learn Persian, so that I may once more enjoy the incomparably beautiful spell of half-understood things.’

Szerb’s novels, short stories, and a handful of essays have been printed in English, most notably Len Rix’s translations published by Pushkin Press.

His greatest novel, the peculiar and melancholy Journey by Moonlight (1937), has been much praised by reviewers:

‘I can’t remember the last time I did this: finished a novel and then turned straight back to page one to start it over again. That is, until I read Journey by Moonlight – and I have started urging it on friends, casual acquaintances, complete strangers and, most insistently, my wife, in a way that may prove counter-productive, but that is none the less sincere. And now I urge it on you.’ — Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian, 2001

‘So much is packed into this novel, not always very neatly, but with an unusual mixture of exuberance, dreaminess – and a casual lightness of touch.’ — Gabriele Annan, London Review of Books, 2003

Szerb’s diaries, letters, lectures, several books of literary criticism, and the remainder of his essays are not yet available in English.

Antal Szerb was born to Jewish parents in Budapest in 1901, the elder of two boys. His father, a merchant whose business ventures were constantly failing, spent beyond his means on books, language study, theatre-going, and foreign travel for his sons.

Szerb was baptised at six, on the same day his father converted to Catholicism, and grew up a devout Catholic. At school he was devoted to the poet-priest Sándor Sík – himself the son of Jewish converts to Catholicism – who taught Hungarian literature, ran the school’s literary circle, and led the Scout troop. Szerb lost his faith in his twenties, but always retained a fascination with religion.

For most of his adult life, he taught English, German, and Hungarian literature at a secondary school in Budapest. He also wrote essays, novels, and literary criticism, and gave lectures to learned societies and on the radio. He had a position at Szeged university, albeit an unpaid one. By his early thirties, still teaching at the secondary school, he was simultaneously the most admired literary scholar of his generation.

His life’s work was the Hungarian language. In 1938, he reportedly turned down an invitation to lecture at Columbia University in New York, saying that ‘it is not worth lecturing on Vörösmarty’s poetry in English.’ (Vörösmarty being the great Hungarian Romantic poet.)

In 1939, Hungarian law ceased to recognise Szerb’s childhood conversion to Catholicism. Officially, he was now a Jew. The anti-Jewish laws, which had been accumulating throughout the decade, now applied to him. He lost his teaching post, and he was no longer permitted to appear on the radio or publish under his own name. His History of World Literature was placed on the official list of forbidden works.

He kept working, translating books from English, French, and Italian, including works by P. G. Wodehouse and Hugh Walpole, and Casanova’s memoirs. He falsely presented his last novel, Oliver VII, as a translation of an English novel.

In June 1944, Szerb was been conscripted for forced labour in Budapest. Two army officers, Jenő Thassy and Guidó Görgey, offered to smuggle him out. To their astonishment, Szerb asked for a day to think it over. The following day he thanked them for their offer, but declined it, giving two reasons: he did not want to abandon his fellow writers, Gábor Halász and György Sárközi, who were serving alongside him; and he had never in his life broken the law, and would not start.

In December 1944, he was sent to the border fortification works in western Hungary, where roughly a third of the 35,000 labourers died. Among the dead were Szerb, Halász, Sárközi, and Szerb’s younger brother Sándor.

Szerb was beaten to death at a labour camp in Balf on 27th January 1945. He was 43. His widow, Klára Bálint, had him exhumed from a mass grave and reburied in Budapest in 1946. At the graveside, the funeral was conducted by Sándor Sík, the poet-priest who had taught him as a boy.

A double interview with two of Szerb’s translators, Peter Czipott and Peter Sherwood.

György Gömöri on growing up with Antal Szerb.

Please feel free to get in touch with your thoughts about this site or Szerb’s writing. I’m particularly keen to get feedback on these translations from Hungarian speakers. You can find me on Twitter (@underthenettle) or email me at hello@antalszerb.com.

The medallion I’ve used as the logo comes from the cover of the first volume of Nyugat, the Hungarian literary magazine first published in 1908, to which Szerb often contributed.

My chief source for the section on Szerb’s life above is József Havasréti’s Hungarian-language biography, published in 2013 and updated in 2019.