About

Antal Szerb (1901–1945)

Antal Szerb was a Hungarian novelist, literary historian, and critic. Born in Budapest, he is best known in English for his novel Journey by Moonlight (Utas és holdvilág, 1937) and his Survey of World Literature (A világirodalom története, 1941), both available from Pushkin Press in translations by Len Rix.

As a critic Szerb was exceptional for his range and his lightness of touch — equally at home with Dante and detective novels, capable of illuminating a writer with a single well-chosen comparison. His essays in Nyugat and elsewhere are among the finest examples of the interwar European literary essay.

Subjected to Hungary's increasingly severe antisemitic legislation in the early 1940s, Szerb was murdered in a forced labour camp at Balf in January 1945, weeks before liberation. He was forty-three.

This project

Szerb's novels and literary histories have found an English readership through Pushkin Press. His essays and shorter criticism — the work closest to his voice as a thinking, reacting reader — remain almost entirely untranslated.

This site presents English translations of those uncollected pieces: the essays on writers he loved, the elegies for books and youth, the lighter criticism that runs alongside the major works. The translations aim for the register of interwar British literary scholarship: Eliot, Connolly, the older Penguin Classics introductions — comfortable with subordinate clauses, slightly archaic by 2020s standards.

Translations are produced paragraph by paragraph, with a full apparatus of annotations noting source decisions, quotation handling, and open editorial questions. Every sentence is traceable in the project's version history.

The translator

[Placeholder — to be filled in.]